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48
Improving retrieval performance by relevance feedback
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science
, 1990
"... Relevance feedback is an automatic process, introduced over 20 years ago, designed to produce improved query formulations following an initial retrieval operation. The principal relevance feedback methods described over the years are examined briefly, and evaluation data are included to demonstrate ..."
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Cited by 756 (6 self)
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Relevance feedback is an automatic process, introduced over 20 years ago, designed to produce improved query formulations following an initial retrieval operation. The principal relevance feedback methods described over the years are examined briefly, and evaluation data are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the various methods. Prescriptions are given for conducting text re-trieval operations iteratively using relevance feedback. Introduction to Relevance Feedback It is well known that the original query formulation process is not transparent to most information system users. In particular, without detailed knowledge of the collection make-up, and of the retrieval environment, most users find
Combination of Multiple Searches
- THE SECOND TEXT RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE (TREC-2
, 1994
"... The TREC-3 project at Virginia Tech focused on methods for combining the evidence from multiple retrieval runs and queries to improve retrieval performance over any single retrieval method or query. The largest improvements result from the combination of retrieval paradigms rather than from the use ..."
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Cited by 437 (2 self)
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The TREC-3 project at Virginia Tech focused on methods for combining the evidence from multiple retrieval runs and queries to improve retrieval performance over any single retrieval method or query. The largest improvements result from the combination of retrieval paradigms rather than from the use of multiple similar queries.
Query expansion using lexical-semantic relations
- In Proceedings of the 17th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
, 1994
"... Applications such as office automation, news filtering, help facilities in complex systems, and the like require the ability to retrieve documents from full-text databases where vocabulary problems can be particularly severe. Experiments performed on small collections with single-domain thesauri sug ..."
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Cited by 395 (1 self)
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Applications such as office automation, news filtering, help facilities in complex systems, and the like require the ability to retrieve documents from full-text databases where vocabulary problems can be particularly severe. Experiments performed on small collections with single-domain thesauri suggest that expanding query vectors with words that are lexically related to the original query words can ameliorate some of the problems of mismatched vocabularies. This paper examines the utility of lexical query expansion in the large, diverse TREC collection. Concepts are represented by WordNet synonym sets and are expanded by following the typed links included in Word Net. Experimental results show this query expansion technique makes little difference in retrieval effectiveness if the original queries are relatively complete descriptions of the information being sought even when the concepts to be expanded are selected by hand. Less well developed queries can be significantly improved by expansion of hand-chosen concepts. However, an automatic procedure that can approximate the set of hand picked synonym sets has yet to be devised, and expanding by the synonym sets that are automatically generated can degrade retrieval performance. 1
Information Retrieval Interaction
, 1992
"... this document, text or image about?' Gradually moving from the left to the right in Figure 3.1, different understandings of this concept evolve ..."
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Cited by 245 (8 self)
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this document, text or image about?' Gradually moving from the left to the right in Figure 3.1, different understandings of this concept evolve
Improving the effectiveness of information retrieval with local context analysis.
- ACM Trans. Inf. Syst.,
, 2000
"... Techniques for automatic query expansion have been extensively studied in information retrieval research as a means of addressing the word mismatch between queries and documents. These techniques can be categorized as either global or local. While global techniques rely on analysis of a whole colle ..."
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Cited by 201 (5 self)
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Techniques for automatic query expansion have been extensively studied in information retrieval research as a means of addressing the word mismatch between queries and documents. These techniques can be categorized as either global or local. While global techniques rely on analysis of a whole collection to discover word relationships, local techniques emphasize analysis of the top-ranked documents retrieved for a query. While local techniques have shown to be more effective than global techniques in general, existing local techniques are not robust and can seriously hurt retrieval when few of the retrieved documents are relevant. We propose a new technique, called local context analysis, which selects expansion terms based on cooccurrence with the query terms within the top-ranked documents. Experiments on a number of collections, both English and non-English, show that local context analysis offers more effective and consistent retrieval results.
Combining the Evidence of Multiple Query Representations for Information Retrieval
- Information Processing & Management
, 1995
"... Abstract-We report on two studies in the TREC-2 program that investigated the effect on retrieval performance of combination of multiple representations of TREC topics. In one of the projects, five separate Boolean queries for each of the 50 TREC routing topics and 25 of the TREC ad hoc topics were ..."
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Cited by 144 (7 self)
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Abstract-We report on two studies in the TREC-2 program that investigated the effect on retrieval performance of combination of multiple representations of TREC topics. In one of the projects, five separate Boolean queries for each of the 50 TREC routing topics and 25 of the TREC ad hoc topics were generated by 75 experienced online searchers. Using the INQUERY retrieval system, these queries were both combined into single queries, and used to produce five separate retrieval results for each topic. In the former case, progressive combination of queries led to progressively improving retrieval performance, significantly better than that of single queries, and at least as good as the best individual single-query formulations. In the latter case, data fusion of the ranked lists also led to performance better than that of any single list. In the second project, two automatically produced vector queries and three versions of a manually produced P-norm extended Boolean query for each routing and ad hoc topic were compared and combined. This project investigated six different methods of combination of queries, and the combination of the same queries on different databases. As in the first project, progressive combination led to progressively improving results, with the best results, on average, being achieved by combination through summing of retrieval status values. Both projects found that the best method of combination often led to results that were better than the best performing single query. The combined results from the two projects have also been combined by data fusion. The results of this procedure show that combining evidence from completely different systems also leads to performance improvement. 1.
COMBINING APPROACHES TO INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
"... The combination of different text representations and search strategies has become a standard technique for improving the effectiveness of information retrieval. Combination, for example, has been studied extensively in the TREC evaluations and is the basis of the “meta-search” engines used on the W ..."
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Cited by 114 (3 self)
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The combination of different text representations and search strategies has become a standard technique for improving the effectiveness of information retrieval. Combination, for example, has been studied extensively in the TREC evaluations and is the basis of the “meta-search” engines used on the Web. This paper examines the development of this technique, including both experimental results and the retrieval models that have been proposed as formal frameworks for combination. We show that combining approaches for information retrieval can be modeled as combining the outputs of multiple classifiers based on one or more representations, and that this simple model can provide explanations for many of the experimental results. We also show that this view of combination is very similar to the inference net model, and that a new approach to retrieval based on language models supports combination and can be integrated with the inference net model.
A Risk Minimization Framework for Information Retrieval
- IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACM SIGIR 2003 WORKSHOP ON MATHEMATICAL/FORMAL METHODS IN IR. ACM
, 2003
"... This paper presents a novel probabilistic information retrieval framework in which the retrieval problem is formally treated as a statistical decision problem. In this framework, queries and documents are modeled using statistical language models (i.e., probabilistic models of text), user preference ..."
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Cited by 66 (2 self)
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This paper presents a novel probabilistic information retrieval framework in which the retrieval problem is formally treated as a statistical decision problem. In this framework, queries and documents are modeled using statistical language models (i.e., probabilistic models of text), user preferences are modeled through loss functions, and retrieval is cast as a risk minimization problem. We discuss how this framework can unify existing retrieval models and accommodate the systematic development of new retrieval models. As an example of using the framework to model non-traditional retrieval problems, we derive new retrieval models for subtopic retrieval, which is concerned with retrieving documents to cover many different subtopics of a general query topic. These new models differ from traditional retrieval models in that they go beyond independent topical relevance.
Inferring probability of relevance using the method of logistic regression
- In Proceedings of ACM SIGIR’94
, 1994
"... This research evaluates a model for probabilistic text and document retrieval; the model utilizes the technique of logistic regression to obtain equations which rank documents by probability of relevance as a function of document and query properties. Since the model infers probability of relevance ..."
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Cited by 47 (1 self)
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This research evaluates a model for probabilistic text and document retrieval; the model utilizes the technique of logistic regression to obtain equations which rank documents by probability of relevance as a function of document and query properties. Since the model infers probability of relevance from statistical clues present in the texts of documents and queries, we call it logistic inference. By transforming the distri-bution of each statistical clue into its standardized distribution (one with mean v = O and standard deviation a = 1), the method allows one to apply logistic coefficients derived from a training collection to other docu-ment collections, with little loss of predictive power. The model is applied to three well-known information retrieval test collections, and the results are compared directly to the particular vector space model of retrieval which uses term-frequency/inverse-document-frequency (tfidf) weighting and the cosine similarity measure. In the comparison, the logistic inference method performs significantly better than (in two collec-tions) or equally well as (in the third collection) the tfidf/cosine vector space model. The differences in per-formances of the two models were subjected to statistical tests to see if the differences are statistically significant or could have occurred by chance. 1.
Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval
- Information Extraction: Towards Scalable, Adaptable Systems
, 1999
"... . Information retrieval addresses the problem of finding those documents whose content matches a user's request from among a large collection of documents. Currently, the most successful general purpose retrieval methods are statistical methods that treat text as little more than a bag of w ..."
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Cited by 38 (0 self)
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. Information retrieval addresses the problem of finding those documents whose content matches a user's request from among a large collection of documents. Currently, the most successful general purpose retrieval methods are statistical methods that treat text as little more than a bag of words. However, attempts to improve retrieval performance through more sophisticated linguistic processing have been largely unsuccessful. Indeed, unless done carefully, such processing can degrade retrieval effectiveness. Several factors contribute to the difficulty of improving on a good statistical baseline including: the forgiving nature but broad coverage of the typical retrieval task; the lack of good weighting schemes for compound index terms; and the implicit linguistic processing inherent in the statistical methods. Natural language processing techniques may be more important for related tasks such as question answering or document summarization. 1 Introduction Imagine that you...
