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Information Retrieval Models

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Ad hoc retrieval models; Document term weighting; Term-document matching function

Definition

A model of information retrieval (IR) selects and ranks the relevant documents with respect to a user’s query. The texts of the documents and the queries are represented in the same way, so that document selection and ranking can be formalized by a matching function that returns a retrieval status value (RSV) for each document in the collection. Most of the IR systems represent document contents by a set of descriptors, called terms, belonging to a vocabulary V.

An IR model defines the query-document matching function according to four main approaches:

  • The estimation of the probability of user’s relevance rel for each document d and query q with respect to a set R q of training documents

    $$ \mathrm{Prob}\kern0.24em \left( rel|\mathbf{d},\mathbf{q},{R}_{\mathbf{q}}\right) $$
  • The computation of a similarity function between queries and documents in a vector space

    $$...

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Correspondence to Giambattista Amati .

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Amati, G. (2018). Information Retrieval Models. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_916

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