Language Models For Information Retrieval Research Articles

Term position‐based language model for information retrieval

AbstractTerm position feature is widely and successfully used in IR and Web search engines, to enhance the retrieval effectiveness. This feature is essentially used for two purposes: to capture query terms proximity or to boost the weight of terms appearing in some parts of a document. In this paper, we are interested in this second category. We propose two novel query‐independent techniques based on absolute term positions in a document, whose goal is to boost the weight of terms appearing in the beginning of a document. The first one considers only the earliest occurrence of a term in a document. The second one takes into account all term positions in a document. We formalize each of these two techniques as a document model based on term position, and then we incorporate it into a basic language model (LM). Two smoothing techniques, Dirichlet and Jelinek‐Mercer, are considered in the basic LM. Experiments conducted on three TREC test collections show that our model, especially the version based on all term positions, achieves significant improvements over the baseline LMs, and it also often performs better than two state‐of‐the‐art baseline models, the chronological term rank model and the Markov random field model.

Learning a Robust Relevance Model for Search Using Kernel Methods

This paper points out that many search relevance models in information retrieval, such as the Vector Space Model, BM25 and Language Models for Information Retrieval, can be viewed as a similarity f...

Exploring the use of unsupervised query modeling techniques for speech recognition and summarization

Statistical language modeling (LM) that intends to quantify the acceptability of a given piece of text has long been an interesting yet challenging research area. In particular, language modeling for information retrieval (IR) has enjoyed remarkable empirical success; one emerging stream of the LM approach for IR is to employ the pseudo-relevance feedback process to enhance the representation of an input query so as to improve retrieval effectiveness. This paper presents a continuation of such a general line of research and the major contributions are three-fold. First, we propose a principled framework which can unify the relationships among several widely-cited query modeling formulations. Second, on top of this successfully developed framework, two extensions have been proposed. On one hand, we present an extended query modeling formulation by incorporating critical query-specific information cues to guide the model estimation. On the other hand, a word-based relevance modeling has also been leveraged to overcome the obstacle of time-consuming model estimation when the framework is being utilized for practical applications. In addition, we further adopt and formalize such a framework to the speech recognition and summarization tasks. A series of experiments reveal the empirical potential of such an LM framework and the performance merits of the deduced models on these two tasks.

Modeling query-document dependencies with topic language models for information retrieval

This paper addresses deficiencies in current information retrieval models by integrating the concept of relevance into the generation model using various topical aspects of the query. The models are adapted from the latent Dirichlet allocation model, but differ in the way that the notation of query-document relevance is introduced in the modeling framework. In the first method, query terms are added to relevant documents in the training of the latent Dirichlet allocation model. In the second method, the latent Dirichlet allocation model is expanded to deal with relevant query terms. The topic of each term within a given document may be sampled using either the normal document-specific mixture weights in LDA using query-specific mixture weights. We also developed an efficient method based on the Gibbs sampling technique for parameter estimation. Experiment results based on the Text REtrieval Conference Corpus (TREC) demonstrate the superiority of the proposed models.

Clusters, language models, and ad hoc information retrieval

The language-modeling approach to information retrieval provides an effective statistical framework for tackling various problems and often achieves impressive empirical performance. However, most previous work on language models for information retrieval focused on document-specific characteristics, and therefore did not take into account the structure of the surrounding corpus, a potentially rich source of additional information. We propose a novel algorithmic framework in which information provided by document-based language models is enhanced by the incorporation of information drawn from clusters of similar documents. Using this framework, we develop a suite of new algorithms. Even the simplest typically outperforms the standard language-modeling approach in terms of mean average precision (MAP) and recall, and our new interpolation algorithm posts statistically significant performance improvements for both metrics over all six corpora tested. An important aspect of our work is the way we model corpus structure. In contrast to most previous work on cluster-based retrieval that partitions the corpus, we demonstrate the effectiveness of a simple strategy based on a nearest-neighbors approach that produces overlapping clusters.

An analysis on document length retrieval trends in language modeling smoothing

Document length is widely recognized as an important factor for adjusting retrieval systems. Many models tend to favor the retrieval of either short or long documents and, thus, a length-based correction needs to be applied for avoiding any length bias. In Language Modeling for Information Retrieval, smoothing methods are applied to move probability mass from document terms to unseen words, which is often dependant upon document length. In this article, we perform an in-depth study of this behavior, characterized by the document length retrieval trends, of three popular smoothing methods across a number of factors, and its impact on the length of documents retrieved and retrieval performance. First, we theoretically analyze the Jelinek---Mercer, Dirichlet prior and two-stage smoothing strategies and, then, conduct an empirical analysis. In our analysis we show how Dirichlet prior smoothing caters for document length more appropriately than Jelinek---Mercer smoothing which leads to its superior retrieval performance. In a follow up analysis, we posit that length-based priors can be used to offset any bias in the length retrieval trends stemming from the retrieval formula derived by the smoothing technique. We show that the performance of Jelinek---Mercer smoothing can be significantly improved by using such a prior, which provides a natural and simple alternative to decouple the query and document modeling roles of smoothing. With the analysis of retrieval behavior conducted in this article, it is possible to understand why the Dirichlet Prior smoothing performs better than the Jelinek---Mercer, and why the performance of the Jelinek---Mercer method is improved by including a length-based prior.

A novel dependency language model for information retrieval

This paper explores the application of term dependency in information retrieval (IR) and proposes a novel dependency retrieval model. This retrieval model suggests an extension to the existing language modeling (LM) approach to IR by introducing dependency models for both query and document. Relevance between document and query is then evaluated by reference to the Kullback-Leibler divergence between their dependency models. This paper introduces a novel hybrid dependency structure, which allows integration of various forms of dependency within a single framework. A pseudo relevance feedback based method is also introduced for constructing query dependency model. The basic idea is to use query-relevant top-ranking sentences extracted from the top documents at retrieval time as the augmented representation of query, from which the relationships between query terms are identified. A Markov Random Field (MRF) based approach is presented to ensure the relevance of the extracted sentences, which utilizes the association features between query terms within a sentence to evaluate the relevance of each sentence. This dependency retrieval model was compared with other traditional retrieval models. Experiments indicated that it produces significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness.

Inferential language models for information retrieval

Language modeling (LM) has been widely used in IR in recent years. An important operation in LM is smoothing of the document language model. However, the current smoothing techniques merely redistribute a portion of term probability according to their frequency of occurrences only in the whole document collection. No relationships between terms are considered and no inference is involved. In this article, we propose several inferential language models capable of inference using term relationships. The inference operation is carried out through a semantic smoothing either on the document model or query model, resulting in document or query expansion. The proposed models implement some of the logical inference capabilities proposed in the previous studies on logical models, but with necessary simplifications in order to make them tractable. They are a good compromise between inference power and efficiency. The models have been tested on several TREC collections, both in English and Chinese. It is shown that the integration of term relationships into the language modeling framework can consistently improve the retrieval effectiveness compared with the traditional language models. This study shows that language modeling is a suitable framework to implement basic inference operations in IR effectively.

Dependency Structure Applied to Language Modeling for Information Retrieval

In this paper, we propose a new language model, namely, a dependency structure language model, for information retrieval to compensate for the weaknesses of unigram and bigram language models. The dependency structure language model is based on the first-order dependency model and the dependency parse tree generated by a linguistic parser. So, long-distance dependencies can be naturally captured by the dependency structure language model. We carried out extensive experiments to verify the proposed model, where the dependency structure model gives a better performance than recently proposed language models and the Okapi BM25 method, and the dependency structure is more effective than unigram and bigram in language modeling for information retrieval.