Empirical Studies of Query/Document Characteristics as Evidence in Favor of Relevance
Warren R. Greiff · 1999
Query/document characteristics known to be useful for information retrieval are analyzed for a specific collection/query-set pair. These features are analyzed in terms of the weight of evidence in favor of relevance provided by values assumed by the feature variables. Weight of evidence, a measure of how much more likely a hypothesis is believed to hold after evidence is considered than before it is observed, is formally defined; and a technique for the analysis of weight of evidence as a function of features of interest is presented. The method is exemplified by showing how it has been applied to analyze evidence in the form of: the coordination level, and the inverse document frequencies and term frequencies for all of the query terms. The result of data analysis is a model of weight of evidence that can be used as the foundation of a retrieval ranking formula. Results of preliminary evaluation of the derived formula are presented and discussed. 1 Introduction This paper presents ...