Applying maximum entropy to known-item email retrieval

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly common in information retrieval to combine evidence from multiple resources to compute the retrieval status value of documents. Although this has led to considerable improvements in several retrieval tasks, one of the outstanding issues is estimation of the respective weights that should be associated with the different sources of evidence. In this paper we propose to use maximum entropy in combination with the limited memory LBFG algorithm to estimate feature weights. Examining the effectiveness of our approach with respect to the known-item finding task of enterprise track of TREC shows that it significantly outperforms a standard retrieval baseline and leads to competitive performance. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.