Term-Specific Smoothing for the Language Modeling Approach to Information Retrieval: The Importance of a Query Term

Djoerd Hiemstra

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

299 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This paper follows a formal approach to information retrieval based on statistical language models. By introducing some simple reformulations of the basic language modeling approach we introduce the notion of importance of a query term. The importance of a query term is an unknown parameter that explicitly models which of the query terms are generated from the relevant documents (the important terms), and which are not (the unimportant terms). The new language modeling approach is shown to explain a number of practical facts of today's information retrieval systems that are not very well explained by the current state of information retrieval theory, including stop words, mandatory terms, coordination level ranking and retrieval using phrases.
Original languageUndefined
Pages35-41
Number of pages7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2002
Event25th Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2002 - Tampere, Finland
Duration: 11 Aug 200215 Aug 2002
Conference number: 25
http://sigir.org/sigir2002/

Conference

Conference25th Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2002
Abbreviated titleSIGIR
Country/TerritoryFinland
CityTampere
Period11/08/0215/08/02
Internet address

Keywords

  • DB-IR: INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
  • EWI-7255
  • IR-66443

Cite this