Modeling Latent Topic Interactions using Quantum Interference for Information Retrieval

Recently, increasing attention has been given to a possible reinterpretation of information retrieval issues in the more general probabilistic framework offered by Quantum Theory. In this paper, we investigate the use of the well-known wave-like phenomenon of Quantum Interference for topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We use interference effects in order to model interactions between latent topics. Our aim is to elaborate a way to build more precise document models starting from original LDA estimations. Experiments in ad-hoc retrieval show statistically significant improvements on several TREC collections.