Abstract
In information retrieval, the data fusion problem is as follows: given two or more independent retrieved sets of ranked documents in response to the same query, how to merge the sets in order to present the user with the most effective ranking? We propose a formalmo del for data fusion that is based on the knowledge that can be derived from the retrieved documents. The modelis based on evidential reasoning, a theory that formally expresses knowledge and the combination of knowledge. Knowledge characterising a ranked list of retrieved documents is symbolised. The combination of knowledge associated to the several retrieval results yields the characterisation of the merged result.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bartell, B., Cottrell, G., and Belew, R. Automatic combination of multiple ranked retrievalsystems. In Proc. 17th ACM SIGIR Conference Dublin,Ireland, 1994, pp. 172–181.
Baumgarten, C. A probabilistic model for distributed information retrieval. In Proc. 21th ACM SIGIR Conference Philadelphia, USA, 1997), pp. 258–266.
Callan, J., Zhihong, L., and Croft, W. Searching distributed collection with inference networks. In Proc. 18th ACM SIGIR Conference Seattle, USA, 1995, pp. 21–28.
Chellas, B. F. Modal Logic: An introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Dreilinger, D., and Howe, A. Experiences with selecting search engines using metasearchI. ACM TOIS 15, 3 (1997), 195–222.
Gauch, S., and Wang, H. Information fusion with ProFusion. In Proceedings of the First World Conference of the Web Society San Francisco, CA, USA, 1996.
Gauch, S., Wang, H., and Gomez, M. ProFusion: Intelligent fusion from multiple distributed search engines. Journal of Universal Computing 2, 9 (1996).
Gravano, L., Chang, K., Garcia-Molina, H., and Paepcke, A. STARTS-Stanford protocol proposal for internet meta-searching. In ACM SIGMOD (1997).
Huibers, T. W. C. An Axiomatic Theory for Information Retrieval. PhD thesis, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, 1996.
Kantor, P., Ng, K., Hirsh, H., Basu, C., Loewenstern, D., and Kudenko, D. Data fusion of machine learning methods for the TREC-5 routing task (and other work). In Proceedings of the fifth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-5), NIST Special Publication (1995).
Ruspini, E. H. The logical foundations of evidentialreasoning. Tech. Rep. 408, SRI International, 1986.
Savoy, J., Calve, A. L., and Vrajitoru, D. Report on the TREC-5 experiment: Data fusion and collection fusion. In Proceedings of the fifth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-5), NIST Special Publication (1995).
Selberg, E., and Etzioni, O. The MetaCrawler architecture for resource aggregation on the web. IEEE Expert 12, 1 (1997), 8–14.
Smeaton, A. Independence of contributing retrievalstrategies in data fusion for effective information retrieval. In Proceedings of the 20th BCS-IRSG Colloquium, Grenoble, France (1998), Springer-Verlag Workshops in Computing. in press.
Smeaton, A., and Crimmins, F. Using a data fusion agent for searching the www. Poster presented at the WWW6 conference, 1997.
Tsikrika, T., and Lalmas, M. Merging techniques for performing data fusion on the web. In Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) (2001), pp. 181–189.
Voorhees, E., Gupta, N., and Johnson-Laird, B. Learning collection fusion strategies. In Proc. 18th ACM SIGIR Conference Seattle, USA, 1995, pp. 172–179.
Yager, R., and Rybalov, A. On the fusion of documents from multiple collection information retrievalsystems. JASIS 49, 13 (1998), 1177–1184.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lalmas, M. (2002). A Formal Model for Data Fusion. In: Carbonell, J.G., Siekmann, J., Andreasen, T., Christiansen, H., Motro, A., Legind Larsen, H. (eds) Flexible Query Answering Systems. FQAS 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2522. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36109-X_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36109-X_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00074-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36109-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive