Improving ranking and robustness of search systems by exploiting the popularity of documents

Abstract

In building Information Retrieval systems, much of research is geared towards optimizing a specific aspect of the system. Consequently, there are a lot of systems that improve effectiveness of search results by striving to outperform a baseline system. Other systems, however, focus on improving the robustness of the system by minimizing the risk of obtaining, for any topic, a result subpar with that of the baseline system. Both tasks have been organized by TREC Web tracks 2013 and 2014, and have been undertaken by the track participants. Our work herein, proposes two re-ranking approaches – based on exploiting the popularity of documents with respect to a general topic – that improve the effectiveness while improving the robustness of the baseline systems. We used each of the runs submitted to TREC Web tracks 2013 – 14 as baseline, and empirically show that our algorithms improve the effectiveness as well as the robustness of the systems in an overwhelming number of cases, even though the systems used to produce them employ a variety of retrieval models.