Probabilistic hyperspace analogue to language

Song and Bruza [6] introduce a framework for Information Retrieval(IR) based on Gardenfor’s three tiered cognitive model; Conceptual Spaces[4]. They instantiate a conceptual space using Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL)[3] to generate higher order concepts which are later used for adhoc retrieval. In this poster, we propose an alternative implementation of the conceptual space by using a probabilistic HAL space (pHAL). To evaluate whether converting to such an implementation is beneficial we have performed an initial investigation comparing the concept combination of HAL against pHAL for the task of query expansion. Our experiments indicate that pHAL outperforms the original HAL method and that better query term selection methods can improve performance on both HAL and pHAL. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval —Retrieval Models General Terms Theory, Experimentation

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Leif Azzopardi, Mark Girolami, Malcolm Crowe
• Keywords: Conceptual Space, Original Hal Method, Probabilistic Hal Space, SIGIR 2005