The Collection Fusion Problem.
Ellen M. Voorhees, N. K. Gupta, Ben Johnson-Laird · 1994
This paper examines the feasibility of merging the results of retrieval runs on separate, autonomous document collections into an effective combined result. In particular, we examine two collection fusion techniques that use the results of past queries to compute the number of documents to retrieve from each of a set of subcollections such that the total number of retrieved documents is equal to N , the number of documents to be returned to the user. The fusion techniques are independent of the particular weighting schemes, similarity measures, and retrieval models used by the component collections. Our official TREC-3 runs are fusion runs in which N = 1000