Retrieving documents by plausible inference: An experimental study

摘要

Choosing an appropriate document representation and search strategy for document retrieval has been largely guided by achieving good average performance instead of optimizing the results for each individual query. A model of retrieval based on plausible inference gives us a different perspective and suggests that techniques should be found for combining multiple sources of evidence (or search strategies) into an overall assessment of a document's relevance, rather than attempting to pick a single strategy. In this paper, we outline our approach to plausible inference for retrieval and describe some experiments designed to test this approach. The experiments use a simple spreading activation search to implement the plausible inference process. The results show that combining term-based, nearest-neighbor, and citation evidence can give significant effectiveness improvements.