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MCP-Focus: Leveraging Function-Oriented Document Enhancement for MCP Server Retrieval

sigir26-058 · Full research paper · Wenchun Jing, Haiyang Shen, Haoran Wang, Qi Liu, Ningyuan Li, Chaoran Luo, Ning Zhang, Yun Ma
Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks · 50% Domain-Specific and Structured Retri · 25% Query and Document Representation En · 12% Domain-Specific and Multilingual Den · 12%
Abstract

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a practical standard for connecting LLM-based agents with external tools and services through MCP servers. Driven by the open-source community, the MCP ecosystem is rapidly expanding, resulting in a large and growing collection of third-party MCP servers. Accurately selecting MCP servers that satisfy functional requirements from many candidates, therefore, becomes an increasingly important problem. However, MCP server documents are often unstructured and exhibit ambiguous function semantics, making it difficult to align user requirements with server capabilities during retrieval. To address this issue, we propose MCP-Focus, a function-oriented document enhancement framework that produces retrieval-ready MCP server documentation via a multi-stage agentic pipeline for white-box code analysis and document generation. Specifically, MCP-Focus first extracts a comprehensive tool inventory with metadata, then refines tool-level descriptions grounded in each extracted tool's implementation, and finally aggregates the refined tool descriptions into a structured server-level overview as the retrieval document. To better evaluate MCP server retrieval, we construct a benchmark comprising 3k+ open-source MCP servers and human-guided queries that vary in semantic ambiguity, input-output specificity, and the number of involved function points. Experiments across multiple dense retrievers show that fine-tuning with MCP-Focus-enhanced documents consistently improves retrieval effectiveness over baseline document methods on multiple benchmarks. Code and data: https://github.com/JingWC/MCP-Focus.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Wonduk Seo
60
62 Automated Visualization Code Synthesis via Multi-path Reasoning and Feedback-Driven Optimizations (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
40 SPIO: Ensemble and Selective Strategies via LLM-Based Multi-Agent Planning in Automated Data Science (2026) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
39 A New Query Expansion Approach for Enhancing Information Retrieval via Agent-Mediated Dialogic Inquiry (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion
2 Kaixin Ma
47
62 DSBench: How Far Are Data Science Agents from Becoming Data Science Experts? (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
55 Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
47 Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Xiaoxi Li 0005 47
Area-chair candidates (5)
Xiaoxi Li 0005 assigned 4715 papers
Hongjin Qian 4112 papers
Chenyan Xiong 4015 papers
Fernando Diaz 0001 3712 papers
Jun Xu 0001 372 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Wonduk Seo assigned 60 3
62 Automated Visualization Code Synthesis via Multi-path Reasoning and Feedback-Driven Optimizations (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
40 SPIO: Ensemble and Selective Strategies via LLM-Based Multi-Agent Planning in Automated Data Science (2026) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
2 Kaixin Ma assigned 47 3
62 DSBench: How Far Are Data Science Agents from Becoming Data Science Experts? (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
55 Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
4 Yu Gu 0016 46 3
66 Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation
62 AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
5 Haritz Puerto 44 3
66 C-SEO Bench: Does Conversational SEO Work? (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
45 MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
6 Jialong Wu 0007 44 3
53 WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
40 OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation
7 Farzad Shami 44 3
63 GROKE: Vision-Free Navigation Instruction Evaluation via Graph Reasoning on OpenStreetMap (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
34 From Single to Multi-agent Reasoning: Advancing GeneGPT for Genomics QA (2026) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
8 Leif Azzopardi 44 3
51 A language modeling framework for expert finding (2009) Domain-Specific and Structured Retrieval
51 Broad expertise retrieval in sparse data environments (2007) Domain-Specific and Structured Retrieval
9 Keping Bi 43 3
50 Pre-training with Aspect-Content Text Mutual Prediction for Multi-Aspect Dense Retrieval (2023) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders
50 A Multi-Granularity-Aware Aspect Learning Model for Multi-Aspect Dense Retrieval (2024) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders
10 Xi Ye 0003 43 3
66 Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision (2026) Deep Research and Report Generation
62 SatLM: Satisfiability-Aided Language Models Using Declarative Prompting (2023) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
11 Farima Fatahi Bayat 42 3
60 From Proof to Program: Characterizing Tool-Induced Reasoning Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
30 FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
12 Tingyu Song 42 3
58 Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
49 IFIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Instruction-Following in Expert-Domain Information Retrieval (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
13 Xiao Wang 0043 41 3
43 Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion
42 ColBERT-PRF: Semantic Pseudo-Relevance Feedback for Dense Passage and Document Retrieval (2023) Query Reformulation and Expansion
15 Archiki Prasad 41 3
62 ReCEval: Evaluating Reasoning Chains via Correctness and Informativeness (2023) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
42 PRInTS: Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Information Seeking (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
16 Daiting Shi COI: co-author 41 3
37 Accurate and Efficient Personalized Query Rewriting in Baidu Search (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion
36 Population-Guided Intent-Aware Query Rewriting for Web Search (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion
17 Shengyao Zhuang 41 3
42 Revisiting Document Expansion and Filtering for Effective First-Stage Retrieval (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion
42 Improving Query Representations for Dense Retrieval with Pseudo Relevance Feedback: A Reproducibility Study (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion
18 Xueguang Ma 40 3
44 R2LLMs: Retrieval and Ranking with LLMs (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
43 Document Expansion Baselines and Learned Sparse Lexical Representations for MS MARCO V1 and V2 (2022) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility
20 Chen Zhao 0013 40 3
66 Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision (2026) Deep Research and Report Generation
57 Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
21 Xinyu Ma 0001 COI: co-author 39 3
50 Pre-training with Aspect-Content Text Mutual Prediction for Multi-Aspect Dense Retrieval (2023) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders
41 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
22 Idan Szpektor 39 3
47 That's Not My Question: Learning to Weight Unmatched Terms in CQA Vertical Search (2016) Domain-Specific and Structured Retrieval
36 Improving recommendation for long-tail queries via templates (2011) Query Reformulation and Expansion
23 Keqin Bao 39 3
63 Teaching Language Models to Reason with Tools (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
62 MTR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Turn Reasoning Evaluation (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
24 Venktesh V 38 3
42 The Surprising Effectiveness of Rankers trained on Expanded Queries (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
39 SUNAR: Semantic Uncertainty based Neighborhood Aware Retrieval for Complex QA (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
25 Jing Liu 0022 38 3
51 A Hierarchical Entity-Based Approach to Structuralize User Generated Content in Social Media: A Case of Yahoo! Answers (2013) Domain-Specific and Structured Retrieval
36 Investigating the Factual Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models with Retrieval Augmentation (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
26 Yuzhong Qu 38 3
51 Towards More Usable Dataset Search: From Query Characterization to Snippet Generation (2019) Domain-Specific and Structured Retrieval
35 Skeleton parsing for complex question answering over knowledge bases (2022) Knowledge Graph Question Answering
27 Negar Arabzadeh 38 3
42 Can QPP Choose the Right Query variant? Evaluating Query Variant Selection for RAG Pipelines (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
37 Matches Made in Heaven: Toolkit and Large-Scale Datasets for Supervised Query Reformulation (2021) Query Reformulation and Expansion
28 Xuhui Sui 38 3
62 Beyond Timestamps: Bridging Forward and Backward Reasoning in Temporal Numerical and Relational Understanding (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
41 TimeR⁴ : Time-aware Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024) RL Training of Search Agents
29 Yong Li 0004 37 3
62 ProBench: Benchmarking GUI Agents with Accurate Process Information (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
45 PG-Agent: An Agent Powered by Page Graph (2025) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
30 Xingyu Tan 0001 37 3
40 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
40 Paths-over-Graph: Knowledge Graph Empowered Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
31 Adam Jatowt 37 3
49 TempRetriever: Fusion-based Temporal Dense Passage Retrieval for Time-Sensitive Questions (2026) Domain-Specific and Structured Retrieval
40 BracketRank: Large Language Model Document Ranking via Reasoning-based Competitive Elimination (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
32 Gustavo Penha 37 3
52 Pairwise Review-Based Explanations for Voice Product Search (2022) Conversational Search and Retrieval
41 Improving Content Retrievability in Search with Controllable Query Generation (2023) Query Reformulation and Expansion
33 Ori Yoran 37 3
63 AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks? (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
40 Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking