Equation 8 · Part 11 · What Actually Happens Between a Query and an Answer in RAG
Denominator: k + r(d)
What this part means
The complete quantity below the fraction bar; it must be nonzero for this division.
Its job in the formula
k + r(d) occurs below the fraction bar. The quantity above the bar is divided by this expression; zero is excluded as a denominator.
Full expression→Denominator: k + r(d)→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Reciprocal rank fusion avoids the currency problem by discarding scores altogether and combining rank positions instead. For a document d and a set of ranked result lists R , with r(d) the rank of d in a given list and a smoothing constant k : . Cormack, Clarke, and Buettcher introduced the method and reported that it consistently outperformed both the individual ranked lists and a Condorcet-style fusion baseline, with the specific virtue that it requires no score normalisation across systems with incompatible scoring functions [ 9 ] . That virtue is also its limitation: two documents ranked first in their respective lists count identically toward the fused score…
Learn the underlying idea
A fraction a/b means a divided by b. The top number is the numerator; the bottom number is the denominator, and it cannot be zero.
Open the illustrated fractions: division written vertically guide →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.