Probabilistic Structured Query Methods

Abstract

Structured methods for query term replacement rely on separate estimates of term frequency and document frequency to compute the weight for each query term. This paper reviews prior work on structured query techniques and introduces three new variants that leverage estimates of replacement probabilities. Statistically significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness are demonstrated for cross-language retrieval and for retrieval based on optical character recognition when replacement probabilities are used to estimate both term frequency and document frequency. UMIACS-TR-2003-27 LAMP-TR-102