David Lillis: Probability-Based Fusion of Information Retrieval Result Sets

Probability-Based Fusion of Information Retrieval Result Sets

David Lillis, Fergus Toolan, Angel Mur, Liu Peng, Rem Collier and John Dunnion

Artificial Intelligence Review, 25(1-2):179--191, Nov. 2006.

Abstract

Information Retrieval (IR) forms the basis of many information management tasks. Information management itself has become an extremely important area as the amount of electronically available information increases dramatically. There are numerous methods of performing the IR task both by utilising different techniques and through using different representations of the information available to us. It has been shown that some algorithms outperform others on certain tasks. Very little progress has been made in fusing various techniques to improve the overall retrieval performance of a system. This paper introduces a probability-based fusion technique probFuse that shows initial promise in addressing this question. It also compares probFuse with the common CombMNZ data fusion technique.