Gravitation-based model for information retrieval

  • Authors:

  • Shuming Shi;Ji-Rong Wen;Qing Yu;Ruihua Song;Wei-Ying Ma

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, P.R. China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, P.R. China;Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, P.R. China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, P.R. China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, P.R. China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper proposes GBM (gravitation-based model), a physical model for information retrieval inspired by Newton's theory of gravitation. A mapping is built in this model from concepts of information retrieval (documents, queries, relevance, etc) to those of physics (mass, distance, radius, attractive force, etc). This model actually provides a new perspective on IR problems. A family of effective term weighting functions can be derived from it, including the well-known BM25 formula. This model has some advantages over most existing ones: First, because it is directly based on basic physical laws, the derived formulas and algorithms can have their explicit physical interpretation. Second, the ranking formulas derived from this model satisfy more intuitive heuristics than most of existing ones, thus have the potential to behave empirically better and to be used safely on various settings. Finally, a new approach for structured document retrieval derived from this model is more reasonable and behaves better than existing ones.