Retrieving documents by plausible inference: a priliminary study

  • Authors:

  • W. B. Croft;T. J. Lucia;P. R. Cohen

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA;Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA;Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

  • Venue:
  • SIGIR '88 Proceedings of the 11th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 1988

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Choosing an appropriate document representation and search strategy for document retrieval has been largely guided by achieving good average performance instead of optimizing the results for each individual query. A model of retrieval based on plausible inference gives us a different perspective and suggests that techniques should be found for combining multiple sources of evidence (or search strategies) into an overall assessment of a document's relevance, rather than attempting to pick a single strategy. In this paper, we explain our approach to plausible inference for retrieval and describe some preliminary experiments designed to test this approach. The experiments use a spreading activation search to implement the plausible inference process. The results show that significant effectiveness improvements are possible using this approach.