Relevance weighting of search terms

This paper examines statistical techniques for exploiting relevance information to weight search terms using information about the distribution of index terms in documents in general and shows that specific weighted search methods are implied by a general probabilistic theory of retrieval.

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines statistical techniques for exploiting relevance information to weight search terms. These techniques are presented as a natural extension of weighting methods using information about the distribution of index terms in documents in general. A series of relevance weighting functions is derived and is justified by theoretical considerations. In particular, it is shown that specific weighted search methods are implied by a general probabilistic theory of retrieval. Different applications of relevance weighting are illustrated by experimental results for test collections.