Tie Breaker
Hao Wu, Hui Min Fang · 2013
Empirical studies of information retrieval suggest that the effectiveness of a retrieval function is closely related to how it combines multiple retrieval signals including term frequency, inverse document frequency and document length. Although it is relatively easy to capture how each signal contributes to the relevance scores, it is more challenging to find the best way of combining these signals since they often interact with each other in a complicated way. As a result, when deriving a retrieval function from traditional retrieval models, the choice of one implementation over the others was often made based on empirical observations rather than sound theoretical derivations.