Abstract:

Inspired by the PageRank and HITS (hubs and authorities) algorithms for Web search, we present a structural re-ranking approach to ad hoc information retrieval: we order the documents in an initially retrieved set by exploiting asymmetric relationships between them. Specifically, we consider generation links, which indicate that the language model induced from one document assigns high probability to the text of another. We study a number of re-ranking criteria based on measures of centrality in the graphs formed by generation links, and show that integrating centrality into standard language-model-based retrieval is quite effective at improving precision at top ranks.

This is joint work with Lillian Lee.