Ranking refinement and its application to information retrieval

We consider the problem of ranking refinement, i.e., to improve the accuracy of an existing ranking function with a small set of labeled instances. We are, particularly, interested in learning a better ranking function using two complementary sources of information, ranking information given by the existing ranking function (i.e., the base ranker) and that obtained from users' feedbacks. This problem is very important in information retrieval where feedbacks are gradually collected. The key challenge in combining the two sources of information arises from the fact that the ranking information presented by the base ranker tends to be imperfect and the ranking information obtained from users' feedbacks tends to be noisy. We present a novel boosting algorithm for ranking refinement that can effectively leverage the uses of the two sources of information. Our empirical study shows that the proposed algorithm is effective for ranking refinement, and furthermore it significantly o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Rong Jin, Hamed Valizadegan, Hang Li
• Keywords: Better Ranking Function, Internet Technology, Ranking Function, Ranking Refinement, WWW 2008