Combination of Document Priors in Web Information Retrieval

Query-independent features (also called document priors), such as the number of incoming links to a document, its Page-Rank, or the type of its associated URL, have been successfully integrated into Web Information Retrieval systems in order to enhance the retrieval effectiveness. The combination of several document priors could further enhance the retrieval performance. However, most current combination of priors approaches are based on heuristics, and often ignore the possible dependence between the document priors. In this paper, we present a novel and robust method for conditionally combining document priors in a principled way. The approach adjusts the distribution of document priors for one source of evidence according to the distribution of document priors for other sources of evidence. We investigate the retrieval performance attainable by our combination of priors method, in comparison to the use of single priors and to a heuristic combination of document priors method, which...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ECIR
• Authors: Jie Peng, Iadh Ounis
• Keywords: Document Priors, Document Priors Method, ECIR 2007, Information Technology, Priors Method