A formal study of information retrieval heuristics

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. One basic research question is thus what exactly are these “necessary” heuristics that seem to cause good retrieval performance. In this paper, we present a formal study of 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 satisfied only 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...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Hui Fang, Tao Tao, ChengXiang Zhai
• Keywords: Retrieval Functions, Retrieval Heuristics, SIGIR 2004, Various Retrieval Heuristics