A simple term frequency transformation model for effective pseudo relevance feedback

Zheng Ye, Jimmy Xiangji Huang

Abstract: Pseudo Relevance Feedback is an effective technique to improve the performance of ad-hoc information retrieval. Traditionally, the expansion terms are extracted either according to the term distributions in the feedback documents; or according to both the term distributions in the feedback documents and in the whole document collection. However, most of the existing models employ a single term frequency normalization mechanism or criteria that cannot take into account various aspects of a term's saliency in the feedback documents. In this paper, we propose a simple and heuristic, but effective model, in which three term frequency transformation techniques are integrated to capture the saliency of a candidate term associated with the original query terms in the feedback documents. Through evaluations and comparisons on six TREC collections, we show that our proposed model is effective and generally superior to the recent progress of relevance feedback models.