Paper Detail

From Ranked Documents to Reliable Contexts: An Answer-Oriented Context Construct Framework for AI Search

Yunfei Zhong, Yinqiong Cai, Lixin Su, Haosheng Qian, Lixin Zou, Yixing Fan, Sheng Xu, Jiafeng Guo, Daiting Shi, Jingzhou He

arxiv Score 7.6

Published 2026-09-20 · First seen 2026-09-22

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Abstract

Traditional Web search follows a human-facing paradigm in which users inspect ranked documents and synthesize information themselves. In AI Search, retrieved documents instead serve as inputs to a generation model, shifting the retrieval objective from ranking documents by Search Satisfaction to constructing reliable context for correct answer generation. We formulate this shift as answer-oriented context construction through a three-stage framework: (1) Answer Support identifies candidate documents that contribute information to answer generation; (2) Content Trustworthiness assesses whether this information provides a reliable basis for correct answers from source, temporal, and factual perspectives; and (3) Context Organization selects, consolidates, and structures retained information under a finite context budget for consistent and robust generation. We further develop an industrial workflow spanning prior and posterior optimization and establish a systematic evaluation protocol covering both retrieval-side context and final answers. Experiments show consistent improvements at both Retrieval and Answer levels, demonstrating the effectiveness of the framework and its industrial implementation.

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BibTeX

@article{zhong2026ranked,
  title = {From Ranked Documents to Reliable Contexts: An Answer-Oriented Context Construct Framework for AI Search},
  author = {Yunfei Zhong and Yinqiong Cai and Lixin Su and Haosheng Qian and Lixin Zou and Yixing Fan and Sheng Xu and Jiafeng Guo and Daiting Shi and Jingzhou He},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Traditional Web search follows a human-facing paradigm in which users inspect ranked documents and synthesize information themselves. In AI Search, retrieved documents instead serve as inputs to a generation model, shifting the retrieval objective from ranking documents by Search Satisfaction to constructing reliable context for correct answer generation. We formulate this shift as answer-oriented context construction through a three-stage framework: (1) Answer Support identifies candidate docum},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23354},
  keywords = {cs.IR},
  eprint = {2609.23354},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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