Incorporating Diversity and Density in Active Learning for Relevance Feedback

Abstract. Relevance feedback, which uses the terms in relevant documents to enrich the user’s initial query, is an effective method for improving retrieval performance. An associated key research problem is the following: Which documents to present to the user so that the user’s feedback on the documents can significantly impact relevance feedback performance. This paper views this as an active learning problem and proposes a new algorithm which can efficiently maximize the learning benefits of relevance feedback. This algorithm chooses a set of feedback documents based on relevancy, document diversity and document density. Experimental results show a statistically significant and appreciable improvement in the performance of our new approach over the existing active feedback methods.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ECIR
• Authors: Zuobing Xu, Ram Akella, Yi Zhang 0001
• Keywords: Document, ECIR 2007, Information Technology, Relevance Feedback, Relevance Feedback Performance