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A Study of Smoothing Methods for Language Models Applied to Ad Hoc Information Retrieval
Abstract
Language modeling approaches to information retrieval are attractive and promising because they connect the problem of retrieval with that of language model estimation, which has been studied extensively in other application areas such as speech recognition. The basic idea of these approaches is to estimate a language model for each document, and then rank documents by the likelihood of the query according to the estimated language model. A core problem in language model estimation is smoothing, which adjusts the maximum likelihood estimator so as to correct the inaccuracy due to data sparseness. In this paper, we study the problem of language model smoothing and its influence on retrieval performance. We examine the sensitivity of retrieval performance to the smoothing parameters and compare several popular smoothing methods on different test collection.
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A vector space model for automatic indexing
Salton, G., Wong, A., & Yang, C. S. (1975) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/361219.361220 · Cited by 7,521
Cited by
A Survey of Automatic Query Expansion in Information Retrieval
Carpineto, C., & Romano, G. (2012) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/2071389.2071390 · Cited by 1,109
Liu, X., Gao, J., He, X., Deng, L., Duh, K., & Wang, Y.-Y. (2015) · Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies · doi:10.3115/v1/n15-1092 · Cited by 395
Searching by Talking: Analysis of Voice Queries on Mobile Web Search
Guy, I. (2016) · Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · doi:10.1145/2911451.2911525 · Cited by 140
Task-Oriented Query Reformulation with Reinforcement Learning
Nogueira, R., & Cho, K. (2017) · Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.18653/v1/d17-1061 · Cited by 120
The Characteristics of Voice Search: Comparing Spoken with Typed-in Mobile Web Search Queries
Guy, I. (2018) · ACM Transactions on Information Systems · doi:10.1145/3182163 · Cited by 71
Metadata
- Authors
- Zhai, C., & Lafferty, J.
- Venue
- ACM SIGIR Forum
- Published
- 2017-08-02
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 268-276
- ISSN
- 0163-5840 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2136542423
- Cited by
- 1,537
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 140.60
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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