What the Query Remembers: Query Abstraction Governs Lexical and Dense Retrieval of Classical Arabic Poetry

Overview

arXiv:2610.31821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How well a poetry archive can be searched depends on what the user still remembers, not only on what the model understands. We show this for Classical Arabic poetry, benchmarking nine dense encoders and BM25 over two corpora, three indexing modes and two evaluation protocols. Which retriever wins is governed by how much of a poem's wording the query still carries. On tip-of-the-tongue queries BM25 leads every dense encoder, including an 8B state-of

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