Synonyms
PRP
Definition
The probability ranking principle asserts that relevance has a probabilistic interpretation. According to this principle documents are ranked by a probability p(Rel| d, q), where Rel denotes the event of a document d being relevant to a query q. Robertson called this principle the probability ranking principle [1].
Key Points
By assuming independence between query terms, Robertson and Sparck-Jones proposed for the probability p(Rel| d, q) the following model (the RSJ model [2]):
where \( \overline{Rel} \) indicates the event of non-relevance; t and \( \overline{t} \) indicate the events that the term t occurs in document d or does not, respectively. For each query term t, the probability p(Rel| d, t) is given by the sum of two log-odds, \(...
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Recommended Reading
Robertson SE. The probability ranking principle in IR. J Doc. 1977;33(4):294–304.
Robertson SE, Sparck-Jones K. Relevance weighting of search terms. J Am Soc Inf Sci. 1977;27(3):129–46.
Robertson SE, Walker S. On relevance weights with little relevance information. In: Proceedings of the 20th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1997. p. 16–24.
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He, B. (2018). Probability Ranking Principle. 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_930
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_930
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