Efficient and effective higher order proximity modeling

Abstract

Bag-of-words retrieval models are widely used, and provide a robust trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. These models often make simplifying assumptions about relations between query terms, and treat term statistics independently. However, query terms are rarely independent, and previous work has repeatedly shown that term dependencies can be critical to improving the effectiveness of ranked retrieval results. Among all term-dependency models, the Markov Random Field (MRF) [Metzler and Croft, SIGIR, 2005] model has received the most attention in recent years. Despite clear effectiveness improvements, these models are not deployed in performance-critical applications because of the..