The difficulty of a user query can affect the performance of Information Retrieval (IR) systems. This work presents a formal model for quantifying and reasoning about query difficulty as follows: Query difficulty is considered to be a subjective belief, which is formulated on the basis of various types of evidence. This allows us to define a belief model and a set of operators for combining evidence of query difficulty. The belief model uses subjective logic, a type of probabilistic logic for modeling uncertainties. An application of this model with semantic and pragmatic evidence about 150 TREC queries illustrates the potential flexibility of this framework in expressing and combining evidence. To our knowledge, this is the first application of subjective logic to IR. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
CITATION STYLE
Lioma, C., Blanco, R., Mochales Palau, R., & Moens, M. F. (2009). A belief model of query difficulty that uses subjective logic. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 5766 LNCS, pp. 92–103). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04417-5_9
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.