2019/04/18 by Jimmy Lin, Lin, Jimmy · 1 citation
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Image Retrieval and Classification Techniques #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Machine Learning and Algorithms #Machine Learning and Data Classification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.08861
openalex publication_date 2019/04/18 · openalex created_date 2019/04/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Motivated by recent commentary that has questioned today's pursuit of ever-more complex models and mathematical formalisms in applied machine learning and whether meaningful empirical progress is actually being made, this paper tries to tackle the decades-old problem of pseudo-relevance feedback with "the simplest thing that can possibly work". I present a technique based on training a document relevance classifier for each information need using pseudo-labels from an initial ranked list and then applying the classifier to rerank the retrieved documents. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements across a number of newswire collections, with initial rankings supplied by "bag of words" BM25 as well as from a well-tuned query expansion model. While this simple technique draws elements from several well-known threads in the literature, to my knowledge this exact combination has not previously been proposed and evaluated.