Theoretical Analysis of Interdependent Constraints in Pseudo-Relevance Feedback

Abstract

Axiomatic analysis is a well-defined theoretical framework for analytical evaluation of information retrieval models. The current studies in axiomatic analysis implicitly assume that the constraints (axioms) are independent. In this paper, we revisit this assumption and hypothesize that there might be interdependence relationships between the existing constraints. As a preliminary study, we focus on the pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) models that have been theoretically studied using the axiomatic analysis approach. In this paper, we introduce two novel interdependent PRF constraints which emphasize on the effect of existing constraints on each other. We further modify two state-of-the-art PRF models, log-logistic and relevance models, in order to satisfy the proposed constraints. Experiments on three TREC newswire and web collections demonstrate that the proposed modifications significantly outperform the baselines, in all cases.