A probabilistic information retrieval model by document ranking using term dependencies

This paper proposes a probabilistic document ranking model incorporating term dependencies. Document ranking is a fundamental information retrieval task. The task is to sort documents in a collection according to the relevance to the user query (Qin et al., Information Retrieval Journal, 13, 346-374, 2010). A probabilistic model is a model for computing the conditional probability of the relevance of each document given query. Most of the widely used models assume the term independence because it is challenging to compute the joint probabilities of multiple terms. Words in natural language texts are obviously highly correlated. In this paper, we assume a multinomial distribution model to calculate the relevance probability of a document by considering the dependency structure of words, and propose an information retrieval model to rank a document by estimating the probability with the maximum entropy method. The results of the ranking simulation experiment in various multinomial situations show better retrieval results than a model that assumes the independence of words. The results of document ranking experiments using real-world datasets LETOR OHSUMED also show better retrieval results.