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SIGIR
2004
ACM

A formal study of information retrieval heuristics

13 years 9 months ago
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...
Hui Fang, Tao Tao, ChengXiang Zhai
Added 30 Jun 2010
Updated 30 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2004
Where SIGIR
Authors Hui Fang, Tao Tao, ChengXiang Zhai
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