Learning collection fusion strategies

Collection fusion is a data fusion problem in which the results of retrieval runs on separate, autonomous document collections must be merged to produce a single, effective result. This paper explores two collection fusion techniques that learn the rmrnber of documents to retrieve from each collection using only the ranked lists of documents returned in response to past queries and those documents! relevance judgments. Retrieval experiments using the TREC test co]lection demonstrate that the effectiveness of the fusion techniques is within 10’?%of the effectiveness of a run in which the entire set of documents is treated as a single collection.

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