An evaluation of evolved term-weighting schemes in information retrieval

This paper presents an evaluation of evolved term-weighting schemes on short, medium and long TREC queries. A previously evolved global (collection-wide) term-weighting scheme is evaluated on unseen TREC data and is shown to increase mean average precision over idf. A local (within-document) evolved term-weighting scheme is presented which is dependent on the best performing global scheme. The full evolved scheme (i.e. the combined local and global scheme) is compared to both the BM25 scheme and the Pivoted Normalisation scheme.Our results show that the local evolved solution does not perform well on some collections due to its document normalisation properties and we conclude that Okapi-tf can be tuned to interact effectively with the evolved global weighting scheme presented and increase mean average precision over the standard BM25 scheme.

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