Supervised and Semi-supervised Machine Learning Ranking

Jean-Noël Vittaut, Patrick Gallinari

Abstract: We present a Semi-supervised Machine Learning based ranking model which can automatically learn its parameters using a training set of a few labeled and unlabeled examples composed of queries and relevance judgments on a subset of the document elements. Our model improves the performance of a baseline Information Retrieval system by optimizing a ranking loss criterion and combining scores computed from doxels and from their local structural context. We analyze the performance of our supervised and semi-supervised algorithms on CO-Focussed and CO-Thourough tasks using a baseline model which is an adaptation of Okapi to Structured Information Retrieval.