A multiple criteria approach for information retrieval

Research in Information Retrieval shows -performance improvement when many sources of evidence are combined to produce a ranking of documents. Most current approaches assess document relevance by computing a single score which aggregates values of some attributes or criteria. We propose a multiple criteria framework using an aggregation mechanism based on decision rules identifying positive and negative reasons for judging whether a document should get a better ranking than another. The resulting procedure also handles imprecision in criteria design. Experimental results are reported.