Fusion from a Condorcet Perspective

Abstract The fusion task is to merge document lists retrieved from a corpus in response to a query. Despite the few decades of research work on fusion, there are still no theoretical tools to formally analyze fusion methods. We use the Condorcet voting rule as a first step to this end. We then present an in-depth empirical analysis of TREC runs and existing fusion methods with respect to Condorcet. In addition, we propose two simple novel fusion approaches which are inspired by the Condorcet rule. Empirical evaluation demonstrates their merits.