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Active feedback in ad hoc information retrieval

Published: 15 August 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Information retrieval is, in general, an iterative search process, in which the user often has several interactions with a retrieval system for an information need. The retrieval system can actively probe a user with questions to clarify the information need instead of just passively responding to user queries. A basic question is thus how a retrieval system should propose questions to the user so that it can obtain maximum benefits from the feedback on these questions. In this paper, we study how a retrieval system can perform active feedback, i.e., how to choose documents for relevance feedback so that the system can learn most from the feedback information. We present a general framework for such an active feedback problem, and derive several practical algorithms as special cases. Empirical evaluation of these algorithms shows that the performance of traditional relevance feedback (presenting the top K documents) is consistently worse than that of presenting documents with more diversity. With a diversity-based selection algorithm, we obtain fewer relevant documents, however, these fewer documents have more learning benefits.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGIR '05: Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
August 2005
708 pages
ISBN:1595930345
DOI:10.1145/1076034
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 15 August 2005

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  1. active feedback
  2. ad hoc information retrieval

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  • (2022)State-of-the-Art Evidence Retriever for Precision Medicine: Algorithm Development and ValidationJMIR Medical Informatics10.2196/4074310:12(e40743)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
  • (2022)BIGexplore: Bayesian Information Gain Framework for Information ExplorationProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517729(1-16)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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