A quasi-synchronous dependence model for information retrieval
Jae Hyun Park, W. Bruce Croft, David A. Smith · 2011
Incorporating syntactic features in a retrieval model has had very limited success in the past, with the exception of binary term dependencies. This paper presents a new term dependency modeling approach based on syntactic dependency parsing for both queries and documents. Our model is inspired by a quasi-synchronous stochastic process for machine translation[21]. We model four different types of relationships between syntactically dependent term pairs to perform inexact matching between documents and queries. We also propose a machine learning technique for predicting optimal parameter settings for a retrieval model incorporating syntactic relationships. The results on TREC collections show that the quasi-synchronous dependence model can improve retrieval performance and outperform a strong state-of-art sequential dependence baseline when we use predicted optimal parameters.