Viewing term proximity from a different perspective

  • Authors:

  • Ruihua Song;Michael J. Taylor;Ji-Rong Wen;Hsiao-Wuen Hon;Yong Yu

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Computer Science and Engineer, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China and Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Microsoft Research Ltd, Cambridge, England;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Dept. of Computer Science and Engineer, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

  • Venue:
  • ECIR'08 Proceedings of the IR research, 30th European conference on Advances in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This paper extends the state-of-the-art probabilistic model BM25 to utilize term proximity from a new perspective. Most previous work only consider dependencies between pairs of terms, and regard phrases as additional independent evidence. It is difficult to estimate the importance of a phrase and its extra contribution to a relevance score, as the phrase actually overlaps with the component terms. This paper proposes a new approach. First, query terms are grouped locally into non-overlapping phrases that may contain one or more query terms. Second, these phrases are not scored independently but are instead treated as providing a context for the component query terms. The relevance contribution of a term occurrence is measured by how many query terms occur in the context phrase and how compact they are. Third, we replace term frequency by the accumulated relevance contribution. Consequently, term proximity is easily integrated into the probabilistic model. Experimental results on TREC-10 and TREC-11 collections show stable improvements in terms of average precision and significant improvements in terms of top precisions.