Using Blog Properties to Improve Retrieval

Three simple heuristics which improve opinion retrieval eectiveness by using blog-specific properties are described, combined with non-blogspecific retrieval approaches, which result in substantial improvements over state-of-the-art.

Abstract

This paper describes three simple heuristics which improve opinion retrieval effectiveness by using blog-specific properties. Blog timestamps are used to increase the retrieval scores of blog posts published near the time of a significant event related to a query; an inexpensive approach to comment amount estimation is used to identify the level of opinion expressed in a post; and query-specific weights are used to change the importance of spam filtering for different types of queries. Overall, these methods, combined with non-blogspecific retrieval approaches, result in substantial improvements over state-of-the-art.