Breaking the Top-k Assumption in Pseudo-Relevance Feedback: An Empirical Analysis of Relevance Distribution in BM25 Rankings
Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) has remained a cornerstone of unsupervised retrieval since Rocchio (1971), yet the foundational assumption that the top- retrieved documents are the best available feedback has received limited direct empirical scrutiny, despite widespread adoption in both classical and neural approache...