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Combining Evidence for Relevance Criteria: A Framework and Experiments in Web Retrieval

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4425))

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Abstract

We present a framework that assesses relevance with respect to several relevance criteria, by combining the query-dependent and query-independent evidence indicating these criteria. This combination of evidence is modelled in a uniform way, irrespective of whether the evidence is associated with a single document or related documents. The framework is formally expressed within Dempster-Shafer theory. It is evaluated for web retrieval in the context of TREC’s Topic Distillation task. Our results indicate that aggregating content-based evidence from the linked pages of a page is beneficial, and that the additional incorporation of their homepage evidence further improves the effectiveness.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

    Theodora Tsikrika & Mounia Lalmas

Authors
  1. Theodora Tsikrika
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  2. Mounia Lalmas
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Giambattista Amati Claudio Carpineto Giovanni Romano

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Tsikrika, T., Lalmas, M. (2007). Combining Evidence for Relevance Criteria: A Framework and Experiments in Web Retrieval. In: Amati, G., Carpineto, C., Romano, G. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4425. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71496-5_43

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71496-5_43

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71494-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71496-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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