Papers for
search system builders
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Ragit enables better testing of document preprocessing for retrieval systems
RAGit: Turning Document Preprocessing into an Experimental Variable for RAG
Abstract: Document preprocessing choices can substantially affect retrieval in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, yet they are often selected heuristically and are difficult to compare under consistent conditions. We present RAGit, an open-source experimentation workbench for the systematic and reproducible evaluation of document preprocessing choices through downstream retrieval. RAGit represents parsing, chunking, indexing, retrieval, and evaluation as configurable experimental stages, enabling controlled comparisons while the remaining downstream settings are kept fixed. It preserves provenance from retrieved chunks to source pages and maps heterogeneous retrieval units to a common page-level ranking for evaluation. The current implementation supports multiple parsers and chunking strategies, dense and late-interaction retrieval, reusable intermediate artifacts, and multi-configuration benchmarking. We demonstrate RAGit through controlled experiments comparing alternative preprocessing configurations under a fixed retrieval setup, illustrating how preprocessing can be treated as an explicit experimental variable. RAGit and its documentation are publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/OmarElbachyr/ragit). A demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/tsst-Bhfz4I.
Evaluating historical search systems requires testing memory and data versions
A Historical Corpus Is Not a Historical System: Auditing Hindsight Leakage in Stateful Data Discovery
Abstract: Offline replay should estimate what a discovery system could retrieve at a historical point, yet freezing the corpus leaves interaction memory unconstrained. We formalize point-in-time (PIT) discovery through historical state $(D_t, θ_t, M_{< i})$ and introduce a paired replay that changes only memory availability. The protocol constructs PIT and full-stream Future views from behavior-only traces and audits selected entries with a Temporal Violation Rate. Across three table-text domains, two stream regimes, two retrievers, and five seeds (216,000 rows), Future inflated Asset Recall@100 by 2.62-5.24 points; all 12 paired intervals excluded zero. With behavior-only trace memory, PIT underperformed the no-memory Stateless condition; Future masked 32.7-48.4% of that harm. For a simulated positive-feedback cache, PIT added 4.65-18.96 points over Stateless while Future added another 4.11-9.58 points. On five timestamped FreshStack topics, Future exceeded PIT by 2.72 points [1.75, 3.71]. Historical evaluation must version and validate memory with the corpus.