A General Language Model for Information Retrieval Fei Song W. Bruce Croft Dept. of Computing and Info. Science Dept. of Computer Science University of Guelph University of Massachusetts Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1 Amherst, Massachusetts 01003
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT However, estimating the probabilities of word sequences can be expensive, since sentences can be arbitrarily long and the size of Statistical language modeling has been successfully used for a corpus needs to be very large. In practice, the statistical speech recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic parsing. language model is often approximated by N-gram models. Recently, it has also been applied to information retrieval. Unigram: P(w ) = P(w )P(w ) ¡ P(w ) According to this new paradigm, each document is viewed as a 1,n 1 2 n language sample, and a query as a generation process. The Bigram: P(w ) = P(w )P(w | w ) ¡ P(w | w ) retrieved documents are ranked based on the probabilities of 1,n 1 2 1 n n−1 producing a query from the corresponding language models of Trigram: P(w ) = P(w )P(w | w )P(w | w ) ¡ P(w | w ) these documents. In this paper, we will present a new language 1,n 1 2 1 3 1,2 n n−2,n−1 model for information retrieval, which is based on a range of data The unigram model makes a strong assumption that each word smoothing techniques, including the Good-Turing estimate, occurs independently, and consequently, the probability of a curve-fitting functions, and model combinations.