An Investigation of Term Weighting Approaches for Microblog Retrieval

The use of effective term frequency weighting and document length normalisation strategies have been shown over a number of decades to have a significant positive effect for document retrieval. When dealing with much shorter documents, such as those obtained from microblogs, it would seem intuitive that these would have less benefit. In this paper we investigate their effect on microblog retrieval performance using the Tweets2011 collection from the TREC 2011 Microblog Track.