A hybrid relevance-feedback approach to text retrieval

  • Authors:
  • Zhao Xu;Xiaowei Xu;Kai Yu;Volker Tresp

  • Affiliations:
  • Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R. China;University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock;University of Munich, Munich, Germany;Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, Munich, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ECIR'03 Proceedings of the 25th European conference on IR research
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Relevance feedback (RF) has been an effective query modification approach to improving the performance of information retrieval (IR) by interactively asking a user whether a set of documents are relevant or not to a given query concept. The conventional RF algorithms either converge slowly or cost a user's additional efforts in reading irrelevant documents. This paper surveys several RF algorithms and introduces a novel hybrid RF approach using a support vector machine (HRFSVM), which actively selects the uncertain documents as well as the most relevant ones on which to ask users for feedback. It can efficiently rank documents in a natural way for user browsing. We conduct experiments on Reuters-21578 dataset and track the precision as a function of feedback iterations. Experimental results have shown that HRFSVM significantly outperforms two other RF algorithms.