Effective Large Scale Text Retrieval via Learning Risk-Minimization and Dependency-Embedded Model

In this paper we present a learning algorithm to estimate a risksensitive and document-relation embedded ranking function so that the ranking score can reflect both the query-document relevance degree and the risk of estimating relevance when the document relation is considered. With proper assumptions, an analytic form of the ranking function is attainable with a ranking score being a linear combination among the expectation of relevance score, the variance of relevance estimation and the covariance with the other documents. We provide a systematic framework to study the roles of the relevance, the variance and the covariance in ranking documents and their relations with the different performance metrics. The experiments show that incorporating the variance in ranking score improves both the relevance and diversity.

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