Probabilistic search team weighting---some negative results

The experimental results show that in this case no improvement over a simple coordination match function can be achieved, and models based on probabilistic indexing outperform the ranking procedures using search term weights.

Abstract

The effect of probabilistic search term weighting on the improvement of retrieval quality has been demonstrated in various experiments described in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of this method for boolean retrieval with terms from a prescribed indexing vocabulary. This is a quite different test setting in comparison to other experiments where linear retrieval with free text terms was used. The experimental results show that in our case no improvement over a simple coordination match function can be achieved. On the other hand, models based on probabilistic indexing outperform the ranking procedures using search term weights.