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Article

Learning to estimate query difficulty: including applications to missing content detection and distributed information retrieval

Published: 15 August 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In this article we present novel learning methods for estimating the quality of results returned by a search engine in response to a query. Estimation is based on the agreement between the top results of the full query and the top results of its sub-queries. We demonstrate the usefulness of quality estimation for several applications, among them improvement of retrieval, detecting queries for which no relevant content exists in the document collection, and distributed information retrieval. Experiments on TREC data demonstrate the robustness and the effectiveness of our learning algorithms.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Context-Aware Query Term Difficulty Estimation for Performance PredictionAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-031-56066-8_4(30-39)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
  • (2023)iQPP: A Benchmark for Image Query Performance PredictionProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591901(2953-2963)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
  • (2022)A Relative Information Gain-based Query Performance Prediction Framework with Generated Query VariantsACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/354511241:2(1-31)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. Learning to estimate query difficulty: including applications to missing content detection and distributed information retrieval

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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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    Published: 15 August 2005

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    View all
    • (2024)Context-Aware Query Term Difficulty Estimation for Performance PredictionAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-031-56066-8_4(30-39)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
    • (2023)iQPP: A Benchmark for Image Query Performance PredictionProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591901(2953-2963)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
    • (2022)A Relative Information Gain-based Query Performance Prediction Framework with Generated Query VariantsACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/354511241:2(1-31)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2022
    • (2022)Experience: Analyzing Missing Web Page Visits and Unintentional Web Page Visits from the Client-side Web LogsJournal of Data and Information Quality10.1145/349039214:2(1-17)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2022
    • (2020)Query Performance Prediction for Multifield Document RetrievalProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGIR on International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval10.1145/3409256.3409821(49-52)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2020
    • (2020)Forward and backward feature selection for query performance predictionProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3341105.3373904(690-697)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2020
    • (2020)Query ClassificationQuery Understanding for Search Engines10.1007/978-3-030-58334-7_2(15-41)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2020
    • (2019)Improving the Accuracy of System Performance Estimation by Using ShardsProceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3331184.3338062(805-814)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2019
    • (2019)Information Needs, Queries, and Query Performance PredictionProceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3331184.3331253(395-404)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2019
    • (2019)Estimating Gaussian mixture models in the local neighbourhood of embedded word vectors for query performance predictionInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2018.10.00956:3(1026-1045)Online publication date: 1-May-2019
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