Predicting query performance by query-drift estimation

Abstract

Predicting query performance, that is, the effectiveness of a search performed in response to a query, is a highly important and challenging problem. Our novel approach to addressing this challenge is based on estimating the potential amount of query drift in the result list, i.e., the presence (and dominance) of aspects or topics not related to the query in top-retrieved documents. We argue that query-drift can potentially be estimated by measuring the diversity (e.g., standard deviation) of the retrieval scores of these documents. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the prediction effectiveness of our approach for several retrieval models. Specifically, the prediction success is better, over most tested TREC corpora, than that of state-of-the-art prediction methods. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.