A reinforcement learning framework for relevance feedback

A Montazeralghaem, H Zamani, J Allan - Proceedings of the 43rd …, 2020 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 43rd international acm sigir conference on research and …, 2020dl.acm.org
We present RML, the first known general reinforcement learning framework for relevance
feedback that directly optimizes any desired retrieval metric, including precision-oriented,
recall-oriented, and even diversity metrics: RML can be easily extended to directly optimize
any arbitrary user satisfaction signal. Using the RML framework, we can select effective
feedback terms and weight them appropriately, improving on past methods that fit
parameters to feedback algorithms using heuristic approaches or methods that do not …
We present RML, the first known general reinforcement learning framework for relevance feedback that directly optimizes any desired retrieval metric, including precision-oriented, recall-oriented, and even diversity metrics: RML can be easily extended to directly optimize any arbitrary user satisfaction signal. Using the RML framework, we can select effective feedback terms and weight them appropriately, improving on past methods that fit parameters to feedback algorithms using heuristic approaches or methods that do not directly optimize for retrieval performance. Learning an effective relevance feedback model is not trivial since the true feedback distribution is unknown. Experiments on standard TREC collections compare RML to existing feedback algorithms, demonstrate the effectiveness of RML at optimizing for MAP and α-n DCG, and show the impact on related measures.
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