DocQAC: Adaptive Trie-Guided Decoding for Effective In-Document Query Auto-Completion
Abstract
Query auto-completion (QAC) has been widely studied in the context of web search, yet remains underexplored for in-document search, which we term DocQAC. DocQAC aims to enhance search productivity within long documents by helping users craft faster, more precise queries, even for complex or hard-to-spell terms. Unlike traditional WebQAC systems, DocQAC can leverage rich document context, having access not only to the partially typed user query and global historical queries, but also the content of the current document itself, and crucially, the document-specific history of user query interactions. To address this setting, we propose a novel adaptive trie-guided decoding framework that uses user query prefixes to softly steer language models toward high-quality completions. Our approach introduces an adaptive penalty mechanism with tunable hyperparameters, enabling a principled trade-off between model confidence and trie-based guidance. To efficiently incorporate document context, we explore retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and lightweight contextual document signals such as titles, keyphrases, and summaries. When applied to encoder–decoder models like T5 and BART, our trie-guided framework outperforms strong baselines and even surpasses much larger instruction-tuned models such as LLaMA-3 and Phi-3 in seen-query settings. This demonstrates its practicality for real-world DocQAC system deployments, where efficiency and scalability are critical. We evaluate our method on a newly introduced DocQAC benchmark derived from ORCAS, enriched with query–document pairs. We make both the DocQAC dataset https://bit.ly/3IGEkbH and code https://github.com/rahcode7/DocQAC publicly available.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Negar Arabzadeh | 54 | 68 Enhanced Retrieval Effectiveness through Selective Query Generation (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion 68 ReFormeR: Learning and Applying Explicit Query Reformulation Patterns (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion 65 Matches Made in Heaven: Toolkit and Large-Scale Datasets for Supervised Query Reformulation (2021) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 2 | Daiting Shi | 47 | 68 Population-Guided Intent-Aware Query Rewriting for Web Search (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion 66 Accurate and Efficient Personalized Query Rewriting in Baidu Search (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion 51 RAG-Enhanced Large Language Models for Dynamic Content Expiration Prediction in Web Search (2026) Information Retrieval and Ranking › Others |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Xiaoxue Zang | 48 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Xiaoxue Zang assigned | 48 | 4 papers | |
| Fernando Diaz 0001 | 48 | 12 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 45 | 2 papers | |
| Chenyan Xiong | 43 | 15 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 43 | 15 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian | 43 | 12 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 40 | 9 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Xiao Wang 0043 | 55 | 3 | 67 Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion 66 Neural Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Models for Sparse and Dense Retrieval (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 2 | Negar Arabzadeh assigned | 54 | 3 | 68 Enhanced Retrieval Effectiveness through Selective Query Generation (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion 68 ReFormeR: Learning and Applying Explicit Query Reformulation Patterns (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 3 | Falk Scholer | 50 | 3 | 70 Can Generative LLMs Create Query Variants for Test Collections? An Exploratory Study (2023) Query Reformulation and Expansion 68 Query association for effective retrieval (2002) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 4 | Idan Szpektor | 49 | 3 | 68 Improving recommendation for long-tail queries via templates (2011) Query Reformulation and Expansion 68 From query to question in one click: suggesting synthetic questions to searchers (2013) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 7 | Daiting Shi assigned | 47 | 3 | 68 Population-Guided Intent-Aware Query Rewriting for Web Search (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion 66 Accurate and Efficient Personalized Query Rewriting in Baidu Search (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 8 | Shengyao Zhuang | 46 | 3 | 66 To Interpolate or not to Interpolate: PRF, Dense and Sparse Retrievers (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion 66 Revisiting Document Expansion and Filtering for Effective First-Stage Retrieval (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 9 | Tetsuya Sakai | 46 | 3 | 68 Flexible Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Using Optimization Tables (2001) Query Reformulation and Expansion 41 Lessons from BMIR-J2: A Test Collection for Japanese IR Systems (1998) Test Collection Construction and Pooling |
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| 10 | Jialong Wu 0007 | 46 | 3 | 68 AdaRewriter: Unleashing the Power of Prompting-based Conversational Query Reformulation via Test-Time Adaptation (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion 68 AdaCQR: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search via Sparse and Dense Retrieval Alignment (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 12 | Wonduk Seo | 44 | 3 | 68 A New Query Expansion Approach for Enhancing Information Retrieval via Agent-Mediated Dialogic Inquiry (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion 32 SPIO: Ensemble and Selective Strategies via LLM-Based Multi-Agent Planning in Automated Data Science (2026) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration |
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| 13 | Xueguang Ma | 44 | 3 | 66 To Interpolate or not to Interpolate: PRF, Dense and Sparse Retrievers (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion 65 Improving Query Representations for Dense Retrieval with Pseudo Relevance Feedback: A Reproducibility Study (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 16 | Mariano Barone | 43 | 3 | 59 Combating Biomedical Misinformation through Multi-modal Claim Detection and Evidence-based Verification (2025) RAG for Domain Applications 47 Combining Evidence and Reasoning for Biomedical Fact-Checking (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
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| 17 | Ruqing Zhang 0001 | 43 | 3 | 74 CorpusBrain++: A Continual Generative Pre-Training Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks (2026) Generative Retrieval 48 Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Generation-Augmented Retrieval: A Co-Training Approach (2025) Generative Retrieval |
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| 18 | Jinheon Baek | 43 | 3 | 68 Database-Augmented Query Representation for Information Retrieval (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion 58 Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA |
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| 20 | Gustavo Penha | 43 | 3 | 65 Improving Content Retrievability in Search with Controllable Query Generation (2023) Query Reformulation and Expansion 64 Evaluating the Robustness of Retrieval Pipelines with Query Variation Generators (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 21 | Mark D. Smucker | 42 | 3 | 61 Find-similar: similarity browsing as a search tool (2006) Query Reformulation and Expansion 52 Simulating the Lateral Reader for News Trustworthiness Reports with an Iterative Multi-Agent RAG System (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG |
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| 22 | Jurek Leonhardt | 42 | 3 | 64 Understanding the User: An Intent-Based Ranking Dataset (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion 43 Data Augmentation for Sample Efficient and Robust Document Ranking (2024) Ranking Distillation and Adaptation |
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| 23 | Farzad Shami | 42 | 3 | 44 From Single to Multi-agent Reasoning: Advancing GeneGPT for Genomics QA (2026) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA 39 Doctron: A Web-based Collaborative Annotation Tool for Ground Truth Creation in IR (2025) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility |
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| 24 | Yuchen Li 0006 | 42 | 3 | 44 Retain to Refine: Adaptive Online Question Answering via Query Routing and Long-Short Memory (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 44 S2phere: Semi-Supervised Pre-training for Web Search over Heterogeneous Learning to Rank Data (2023) Web-Scale Learning to Rank |
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| 25 | Yujia Zhou 0002 | 42 | 3 | 48 Grounding Language Model with Chunking-Free In-Context Retrieval (2024) Generative Retrieval 48 CorpusLM: Towards a Unified Language Model on Corpus for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2024) Generative Retrieval |
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| 26 | Xinyu Ma 0001 | 41 | 3 | 49 Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion 44 Model Editing for New Document Integration in Generative Information Retrieval (2026) Generative Retrieval |
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| 27 | Venktesh V | 41 | 3 | 64 Understanding the User: An Intent-Based Ranking Dataset (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion 58 The Surprising Effectiveness of Rankers trained on Expanded Queries (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 28 | Antonio Mallia | 41 | 3 | 65 Unveiling DIME: Reproducibility, Generalizability, and Formal Analysis of Dimension Importance Estimation for Dense Retrieval (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion 40 Feature Extraction for Large-Scale Text Collections (2020) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility |
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| 29 | Weiwei Sun 0001 | 41 | 3 | 44 Learning to Tokenize for Generative Retrieval (2023) Generative Retrieval 44 Replication and Exploration of Generative Retrieval over Dynamic Corpora (2025) Generative Retrieval |
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| 30 | Leif Azzopardi | 41 | 3 | 46 Improving sentence retrieval with an importance prior (2010) Query and Document Representation Enhancement 44 Query Variation Performance Prediction for Systematic Reviews (2018) Query Performance Prediction |
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| 31 | Adam Jatowt COI: co-author | 41 | 3 | 68 Search Intent Discovery by Structurization of Community QA Contents (2012) Query Reformulation and Expansion 43 BracketRank: Large Language Model Document Ranking via Reasoning-based Competitive Elimination (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 32 | Xingyu Tan 0001 | 41 | 3 | 44 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning 44 MemoTime: Memory-Augmented Temporal Knowledge Graph Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2026) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
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| 33 | Jing Liu 0022 | 41 | 3 | 44 TOME: A Two-stage Approach for Model-based Retrieval (2023) Generative Retrieval 44 A Regularized Competition Model for Question Difficulty Estimation in Community Question Answering Services (2014) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA |
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| 34 | Di Wu 0054 | 40 | 3 | 61 Repoformer: Selective Retrieval for Repository-Level Code Completion (2024) Efficient and Long-Context RAG 46 LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 36 | Jaime Arguello | 40 | 3 | 68 Document Representation and Query Expansion Models for Blog Recommendation (2008) Query Reformulation and Expansion 44 Using Query Performance Predictors to Improve Spoken Queries (2016) Query Performance Prediction |
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| 37 | Keping Bi | 40 | 3 | 48 Beyond Relevance: Utility-Centric Retrieval in the LLM Era (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 46 Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |