An Exploration of Tie-Breaking for Microblog Retrieval

Microblog retrieval enables users to access relevant information from the huge number of tweets posted on social media. Since tweets are different from traditional documents, existing IR models might not be the optimal choice for this problem. Tie-breaking has been recently proposed as a new way of combining multiple retrieval signals. In this paper, we focus on studying the potential of this approach in microblog retrieval and propose new methods to further improve the performance. Experiment results show that these tie-breaking based methods can achieve comparable performance with the top runs in the TRECMicroblog track.