Combining evidence for Web retrieval using the inference network model: an experimental study

摘要

In the Web context, link-based evidence is most commonly used in conjunction with content-based evidential information in order to improve retrieval effectiveness. This paper examines the impact the various types of link-based evidence and their combination with content-based evidence have on the retrieval effectiveness for the topic relevance Web task. The inference network model is used in our study, as it supports the combination of multiple document representations and the combination of multiple results produced by different retrieval strategies. Our experiments indicate hardly any improvements in the effectiveness, similarly to previous TREC results for the topic relevance task. However, they allow us to gain an insight into the behaviour of different types of link-based evidence that could be exploited in the context of other retrieval tasks.