Incremental Relevance Feedback in Japanese Text Retrieval

Abstract

The application of relevance feedback techniques has been shown to improve retrieval performance for a number of information retrieval tasks. This paper explores incremental relevance feedback for ad hoc Japanese text retrievals examining, separately and in combination, the utility of term reweighting and query expansion using a probabilistic retrieval model. Retrieval performance is evaluated in terms of standard precision-recall measures, and also using “number-to-view” graphs. Experimental results, on the standard BMIR-J2 Japanese language retrieval collection, show that both term reweighting and query expansion improve retrieval performance. This is reflected in improvements in both precision and recall, but also a reduction in the average number of documents which must be viewed to find a selected number of relevant items. In particular, using a simple simulation of user searching, incremental application of relevance information is shown to lead to progressively improved retrieval performance and an overall reduction in the number of documents that a user must view to find relevant ones.