Retrieval study / Frozen corpus · held-out queries

Does context help
us find the idea?

A lexical baseline. A graph of contextual relations. One measured question: does following those relations improve retrieval of an intended concept?

See the evidence Try a query
01 / Results

Let the result stand.

The primary comparison was specified before scoring. A null or negative result remains part of the record.

Ranked retrieval

Methods, on the same test set

Family-mean scores. Higher means a better rank for the assigned intended target.

Held-out retrieval metrics across the lexical baseline, contextual graph, and controls.
Paired comparison

Where the change lands

Compare the graph with the selected lexical method at the family level.

Paired effects of contextual graph retrieval relative to the selected lexical baseline.

Every predefined method

Held-out only
MethodMRR@10Hit@1Hit@5Hit@10Hit@20Discounted rank@10MRR (all ranks)

Each query has one assigned intended target. Other relevant concepts are unjudged. “Hit” means that intended target appeared; these are not precision or exhaustive relevance estimates. The five rewired runs are controls on one dataset, not five independent datasets.

Explore query kinds, historical bands and graph structure
GroupLexical MRR@10Graph MRR@10Difference

Subgroup results are exploratory. ID bands balance position in the historical sequence; they are not subject domains.

A contextual graph with uneven degree

Degree distribution of the checked undirected contextual graph.

Application and boundary questions are retrieval probes. These measurements do not establish comprehension, reasoning, transfer or universal superiority of one search approach.

03 / Query explorer

Inspect the questions.
Look past the average.

All held-out probes and their recorded rankings. The assigned target is hidden until you reveal it, so you can inspect the outputs first.

Synthetic questions. Partial gold. Two AI author processes wrote from target names and definitions. An assigned target is one intended answer, not a judgment that every other result is irrelevant. No independent human relevance pool was collected.

Lexical baseline

    With context graph

      These are the frozen Python evaluation rankings. Live search independently applies the same exported weights and graph recipe in JavaScript. Gold labels are inspectable in downloads and embedded data; the reveal control is a reading aid, not formal blinding.

      04 / Method

      A narrow claim.
      An open procedure.

      No relation edits, target changes or parameter adjustments in response to held-out scores. Every method answers to the same checked snapshot and frozen questions.

      01 / Corpus

      A checked snapshot

      Only names and definitions are indexed. Names appear twice. Source articles, relation labels, provenance notes and IDs contribute no lexical terms.

      02 / Questions

      Families stay together

      120 intended targets sampled across six sequential ID bands. Each gets a paraphrase, an application and a boundary question. Forty families tune parameters; eighty are held out.

      Authors see assigned names and definitions. They share a project and model family. This is AI-authored known-target retrieval, not independent human relevance assessment.

      03 / Ranking

      The same lexical start

      BM25, cosine TF-IDF and reciprocal rank fusion compete on development MRR@10. The chosen lexical method seeds a twenty-step contextual walk from its top twenty positive results.

      04 / Uncertainty

      Resample the family

      Three variants are averaged within each family. The primary contrast is graph minus selected lexical MRR@10 over the eighty held-out families.

      A paired percentile bootstrap uses 10,000 resamples; a two-sided paired sign-flip test uses 10,000 draws and a plus-one correction. Secondary analyses are exploratory.

      Scoring, controls and limits

      Words first

      Lowercase ASCII alphanumeric tokens of at least two characters, a fixed stop list and no stemming. BM25 uses k₁ = 1.2, b = 0.75 and unique query terms. TF-IDF uses logarithmic term frequency and cosine normalization. Fusion sums 1 / (60 + rank) over positive-scoring BM25 and TF-IDF results.

      Context as a controlled intervention

      Checked links become deduplicated undirected pairs; self loops are excluded. The graph carries context, not a semantic predicate. Seeds are normalized lexical scores. Every walk step mixes seed restart with neighbor propagation; mass at disconnected nodes returns to the seeds. The final score mixes max-normalized lexical and walk scores.

      Six nonzero graph settings compete on development families. The graph cannot silently select the unchanged baseline. Five degree-preserving rewired graphs use the same locked settings. Degree-only, empty-edge and stored-direction controls are reported. Directed results are exploratory.

      What a zero means

      Only positive scores are ranked; ties break by ascending checked ID. An absent intended target has no rank and receives zero. With no lexical evidence there is no graph seed and no fabricated result from zero-score ties.

      The boundary of the evidence

      MRR@10 gives a target at rank r a score of 1/r if r ≤ 10 and zero otherwise. Discounted rank uses one assigned target, not comprehensive relevance judgments. Confidence intervals cover the sampled synthetic families; they do not establish behavior for all users. The confirmatory comparison evaluates the specified lexical and graph methods; it does not measure comprehension.

      The protocol is locally prospective and frozen before scoring. It is not externally registered or externally timestamped. Author blinding was limited: target IDs, historical bands and ordered family keys were visible. The split was not explicitly supplied, but could be inferred. A prospective addendum corrects the original stronger claim. Hiding a label in the explorer is not external or human blinding.

      The study at a glance

      From frozen corpus to held-out comparison

      Query families, the development lock and the confirmatory comparison remain separate stages.

      Study design showing corpus selection, query authoring, development tuning, parameter locking and held-out evaluation.
      Verifiable record

      Snapshot and parameter lock

      Methodological sources

        05 / Downloads

        Take the evidence
        with you.

        The questions, frozen procedure, results and reproduction materials belong beside the conclusion. The page runs locally without external libraries; reproducing the experiments requires the documented scientific and inference dependencies.