Topic based language models for ad hoc information retrieval

We propose a topic based approach to language modelling for ad-hoc information retrieval (IR). Many smoothed estimators used for the multinomial query model in IR rely upon the estimated background collection probabilities. In this paper, we propose a topic based language modelling approach, that us...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2004 IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks Vol. 4; pp. 3281 - 3286 vol.4
Main Authors Azzopardi, L., Girolami, M., van Rijsbergen, C.J.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published Piscataway NJ IEEE 2004
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ISBN0780383591
9780780383593
ISSN1098-7576
DOI10.1109/IJCNN.2004.1381205

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Summary:We propose a topic based approach to language modelling for ad-hoc information retrieval (IR). Many smoothed estimators used for the multinomial query model in IR rely upon the estimated background collection probabilities. In this paper, we propose a topic based language modelling approach, that uses a more informative prior based on the topical content of a document. In our experiments, the proposed model provides comparable IR performance to the standard models, but when combined in a two stage language model, it outperforms all other estimated models.
ISBN:0780383591
9780780383593
ISSN:1098-7576
DOI:10.1109/IJCNN.2004.1381205