The DOI matches its Crossref record; 14 of the 14 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Information Retrieval as Statistical Translation
Abstract
We propose a new probabilistic approach to information retrieval based upon the ideas and methods of statistical machine translation. The central ingredient in this approach is a statistical model of how a user might distill or "translate" a given document into a query. To assess the relevance of a document to a user's query, we estimate the probability that the query would have been generated as a translation of the document, and factor in the user's general preferences in the form of a prior distribution over documents. We propose a simple, well motivated model of the document-to-query translation process, and describe an algorithm for learning the parameters of this model in an unsupervised manner from a collection of documents. As we show, one can view this approach as a generalization and justification of the "language modeling" strategy recently proposed by Ponte and Croft. In a series of experiments on TREC data, a simple translation-based retrieval system performs well in comparison to conventional retrieval techniques. This prototype system only begins to tap the full potential of translation-based retrieval.
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Cites
Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data Via the EM Algorithm
Dempster, A. P., Laird, N. M., & Rubin, D. B. (1977) · Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology · doi:10.1111/j.2517-6161.1977.tb01600.x · Cited by 50,444
Term-weighting approaches in automatic text retrieval
Salton, G., & Buckley, C. (1988) · Information Processing & Management · doi:10.1016/0306-4573(88)90021-0 · Cited by 9,740
Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data via the EM Algorithm
Dempster, A. P., Laird, N. M., & Rubin, D. B. (1976) · Cited by 4,517
The mathematics of statistical machine translation: parameter estimation
Brown, P. F., Pietra, V. J. D., Pietra, S. A. D., & Mercer, R. L. (1993) · Cited by 3,973
A Language Modeling Approach to Information Retrieval
Ponte, J. M., & Croft, W. B. (2017) · ACM SIGIR Forum · doi:10.1145/3130348.3130368 · Cited by 2,503
Robertson, S. E., Walker, S., Jones, S., Hancock‐Beaulieu, M., & Gatford, M. (1994) · Text REtrieval Conference · Cited by 2,212
Relevance weighting of search terms
Robertson, S. E., & Jones, K. S. (1976) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · doi:10.1002/asi.4630270302 · Cited by 2,081
A language modeling approach to information retrieval
Ponte, J. M., & Croft, W. B. (1998) · Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval · doi:10.1145/290941.291008 · Cited by 1,821
A statistical approach to machine translation
Brown, P. F., Cocke, J., Pietra, S. A. D., Pietra, V. J. D., Jelinek, F., Lafferty, J., Mercer, R. L., & Roossin, P. S. (1990) · doi:10.5555/92858.92860 · Cited by 1,655
Self-citationInformation retrieval on the web
Kobayashi, M., & Takeda, K. (2000) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/358923.358934 · Cited by 562
Cited by
A Study of Smoothing Methods for Language Models Applied to Ad Hoc Information Retrieval
Zhai, C., & Lafferty, J. (2017) · ACM SIGIR Forum · doi:10.1145/3130348.3130377 · Cited by 1,537
Self-citationA study of smoothing methods for language models applied to information retrieval
Zhai, C., & Lafferty, J. (2004) · ACM Transactions on Information Systems · doi:10.1145/984321.984322 · Cited by 1,201
Self-citationLDA-based document models for ad-hoc retrieval
Wei, X., & Croft, W. B. (2006) · Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval · doi:10.1145/1148170.1148204 · Cited by 1,075
Model-based feedback in the language modeling approach to information retrieval
Zhai, C., & Lafferty, J. (2001) · Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Information and knowledge management · doi:10.1145/502585.502654 · Cited by 787
Self-citationTranslation techniques in cross-language information retrieval
Zhou, D., Truran, M., Brailsford, T., Wade, V., & Ashman, H. (2012) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/2379776.2379777 · Cited by 698
Metadata
- Authors
- Berger, A., & Lafferty, J.
- Venue
- ACM SIGIR Forum
- Published
- 2017-08-02
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 219-226
- ISSN
- 0163-5840 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2062270497
- Cited by
- 621
- References
- 14
- FWCI
- 43.30
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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