A field relevance model for structured document retrieval

Abstract

Many search applications involve documents with structure or fields. Since query terms often are related to specific structural components, mapping queries to fields and assigning weights to those fields is critical for retrieval effectiveness. Although several field-based retrieval models have been developed, there has not been a formal justification of field weighting. In this work, we aim to improve the field weighting for structured document retrieval. We first introduce the notion of field relevance as the generalization of field weights, and discuss how it can be estimated using relevant documents, which effectively implements relevance feedback for field weighting. We then propose a framework for estimating field relevance based on the combination of several sources. Evaluation on several structured document collections show that field weighting based on the suggested framework improves retrieval effectiveness significantly. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.