Find-similar: similarity browsing as a search tool

  • Authors:
  • Mark D. Smucker;James Allan

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst;University of Massachusetts Amherst

  • Venue:
  • SIGIR '06 Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Search systems have for some time provided users with the ability to request documents similar to a given document. Interfaces provide this feature via a link or button for each document in the search results. We call this feature find-similar or similarity browsing. We examined find-similar as a search tool, like relevance feedback, for improving retrieval performance. Our investigation focused on find-similar's document-to-document similarity, the reexamination of documents during a search, and the user's browsing pattern. Find-similar with a query-biased similarity, avoiding the reexamination of documents, and a breadth-like browsing pattern achieved a 23% increase in the arithmetic mean average precision and a 66% increase in the geometric mean average precision over our baseline retrieval. This performance matched that of a more traditionally styled iterative relevance feedback technique.