Title: Enhancement of passage scorers by proximity-based term occurrence weighting

Authors: Rey-Long Liu; Rey-Hsing Hu

Addresses: Department of Medical Informatics, Tzu Chi University, No. 701, Sec. 3, Jhongyang Rd., Hualien City, Hualien County 97004, Taiwan ' Computer Center, Tzu Chi University, No. 701, Sec. 3, Jhongyang Rd., Hualien City, Hualien County 97004, Taiwan

Abstract: Given a query and a document, passage retrievers aim at selecting from the document those passages that are relevant to the query. Passage scoring is thus essential for passage retrievers. In this paper, we present a technique named proximity-based term occurrence weighting (PTOW), which employs term proximity information to enhance various kinds of passage scorers. For each occurrence of a query term t at position k in a passage, PTOW increments the weight of the occurrence based on how other query terms appear around k. The occurrence weight is then passed to the passage scorers. Empirical evaluation shows that PTOW significantly enhances two passage scorers. Moreover, when compared with two state-of-the-art techniques that enhance scorers by term proximity information, PTOW performs significantly better as well. The contributions are of practical significance, since many passage scorers have been developed and PTOW may further enhance their performance.

Keywords: passage retrieval; passage scoring; term proximity; term occurrence weighting; information retrieval; document passages; document queries; query terms; search terms.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2013.057413

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2013 Vol.7 No.6, pp.496 - 515

Received: 19 Dec 2012
Accepted: 16 May 2013

Published online: 31 Mar 2014 *

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