Rewarding term location information to enhance probabilistic information retrieval

Jiashu Zhao, Jimmy Xiangji Huang, Shicheng Wu

Abstract: We investigate the effect of rewarding terms according to their locations in documents for probabilistic information retrieval. The intuition behind our approach is that a large amount of authors would summarize their ideas in some particular parts of documents. In this paper, we focus on the beginning part of documents. Several shape functions are defined to simulate the influence of term location information. We propose a Reward Term Retrieval model that combines the reward terms' information with BM25 to enhance probabilistic information retrieval performance.