formula

A query model based on normalized log-likelihood

A query is usually a brief, sometimes imprecise expression of an underlying information need . Examining how queries can be transformed to equivalent, potentially better queries is a theme of recurring interest to the information retrieval community. Such transformations include expansion of short queries to long queries, paraphrasing queries using…
Stack of books

Concept models for domain-specific search

We describe our participation in the 2008 CLEF Domain-specific track. We evaluate blind relevance feedback models and concept models on the CLEF domain-specific test collection. Applying relevance modeling techniques is found to have a positive effect on the 2008 topic set, in terms of mean average precision and precision@10. Applying…
mathematics

Parsimonious Relevance Models

Relevance feedback is often applied to better capture a user’s information need. Automatically reformulating queries (or blind relevance feedback) entails looking at the terms in some set of (pseudo-)relevant documents and selecting the most informative ones with respect to the set or the collection. These terms may then be reweighed…
concepts

Parsimonious concept modeling

In many collections, documents are annotated using concepts from a structured knowledge source such as an ontology or thesaurus. Examples include the news domain, where each news item is categorized according to the nature of the event that took place, and Wikipedia, with its per-article categories. These categorizing systems originally…

Integrating Conceptual Knowledge into Relevance Models: A Model and Estimation Method

We address the issue of combining explicit background knowledge with pseudo-relevance feedback from within a document collection. To this end, we use document-level annotations in tandem with generative language models to generate terms from pseudo-relevant documents and bias the probability estimates of expansion terms in a principled manner. By applying…