Fusion in Information Retrieval

Fusion is an important and central concept in Information Retrieval. The goal of fusion methods is to merge different sources of information so as to address a retrieval task. For example, in the adhoc retrieval setting, fusion methods have been applied to merge multiple document lists retrieved for a query. The lists could be retrieved using different query representations, document representations, ranking functions and corpora. The goal of this half day, intermediate-level, tutorial is to provide a methodological view of the theoretical foundations of fusion approaches, the numerous fusion methods that have been devised and a variety of applications for which fusion techniques have been applied.