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. While global historical queries are available to both WebQAC and DocQAC, DocQAC uniquely accesses document-specific context, including the current document’s content and its 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 on seen queries across both seen and unseen documents. This demonstrates its practicality for real-world DocQAC 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. While global historical queries are available to both WebQAC […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"arXiv","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2026-04-20","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":false,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[{"provider":"s2","id":"65c694e87eac784ec4d4b2119661e5a9628ea1b4"},{"provider":"arxiv","id":"2604.18257"}],"msr_hide_image_in_river":null,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13555],"msr-publication-type":[193724],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[263203,246691,248503],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-1169852","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-search-information-retrieval","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-computation-and-language","msr-field-of-study-computer-science","msr-field-of-study-information-retrieval"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2026-04-20","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"arXiv","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":0,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2604.18257","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"name","value":"Rahul Mehta","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"V. KavinR","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Indrajit Pal","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Tushar Abhishek","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Pawan Goyal","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Manish Gupta","user_id":31891,"rest_url":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Manish Gupta"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199562],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[],"msr_project":[],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[],"msr_publication_type":"miscellaneous","related_content":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1169852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1169852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1171132,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1169852\/revisions\/1171132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1169852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publisher?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=1169852"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=1169852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}