Abstract

It has been known that different representations of a query retrieve different sets of documents. Recent work suggests that significant improvements in retrieval performance can be achieved by combining multiple representations of an information need. However, little effort has been made to understand the reason why combining multiple sources of evidence improves retrieval effectiveness. In this paper we analyze why improvements can be achieved with evidence combination, and investigate how evidence should be combined. We describe a rationale for multiple evidence combination, and propose a combining method whose properties coincide with the rationale. We also investigate the effect of using rank instead of similarity on retrieval effectiveness. 1 Introduction A variety of representation techniques for queries and documents have been proposed in the information retrieval (IR) literature, and many corresponding retrieval techniques have also been developed to get higher retrieval effec...

Citations

278	Combination of multiple searches - Fox, Shaw - 1994
203	B.: Evaluation of an Inference Network-Based Retrieval Model - Turtle, Croft - 1991
108	Combining the evidence of multiple query representations for information retrieval - Belkin, Kantor, et al. - 1995
97	Combining multiple evidence from different properties of weighting schemes - Lee - 1995
77	The effect of multiple query representations on information retrieval system performance - Belkin, Cool, et al. - 1993
54	A study of information seeking and retrieving. III. Searchers, searches, and overlap - Saracevic, Kantor - 1988
49	A study of the overlap among document representations - Das-Gupta, Katzer - 1983
29	An evaluation of factors affecting document ranking by information retrieval systems - McGill, Koll, et al. - 1979
4	Analyzing the effectiveness of extended boolean models in information retrieval - Lee - 1995
1	Overview of the 1st text retrieval conference - Harman - 1993