Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Similar Documents
An Exploration of Formalized Information Retrieval Heuristics
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Fang, Hui Zhai, Cheng Xiang |
| Copyright Year | 2008 |
| Abstract | Empirical studies of information retrieval methods show that good retrieval performance is closely related to the use of various retrieval heuristics, such as TF-IDF weighting. Any effective retrieval formula, no matter how it is originally motivated, also often boils down to an explicit or implicit implementation of these heuristics. One basic research question is thus what are exactly these “necessary” heuristics that seem to cause good retrieval performance. In this paper, we present a formal study of these retrieval heuristics. We formally define a set of basic desirable constraints that any reasonable retrieval function should satisfy, and check these constraints on a variety of representative retrieval functions. We find that none of these retrieval functions satisfies all the constraints unconditionally. Empirical results show that when a constraint is not satisfied, it often indicates non-optimality of the method, and when a constraint is only satisfied for a certain range of parameter values, its performance tends to be poor when the parameter is out of the range. In general, we find that the empirical performance of a retrieval formula is tightly related to how well they satisfy these constraints. Thus the proposed constraints can provide a good explanation of many empirical observations and make it possible to evaluate any existing or new retrieval formula analytically. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~czhai/paper/mfir03-heu.ps |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~czhai/paper/mfir03-heu.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/czhai/pub/mfir03-heu.ps |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/czhai/pub/mfir03-heu.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~czhai/paper/mfir03-heu.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
