Probabilistic retrieval incorporating the relationships of descriptors incrementally

Abstract

The previous probabilistic retrieval models assume that the relevance probability of a document is independent of the descriptors that are not specified in a query. This is not true in practice because there can be many descriptors that represent the same concept. The probabilistic retrieval model developed in this paper overcomes this unsuitable assumption and incorporates the relationships of descriptors. A learning method is also proposed to figure out the relationships incrementally. Each time retrieval results are available, the method identities in the relevant documents the descriptors that designate the concepts specified by the query descriptors. Although it employs user feedbacks like relevance feedback, it attempts to capture certain stable relationships of descriptors from many past user queries rather than to distinguish relevant documents from non-relevant ones for a particular query. We show through experiments that the proposed information retrieval method improves retrieval effectiveness over time. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.