Term Frequency Normalisation Tuning for BM25 and DFR Models

The term frequency normalisation parameter tuning is a crucial issue in information retrieval (IR), which has an important impact on the retrieval performance. The classical pivoted normalisation approach suffers from the collection-dependence problem. As a consequence, it requires relevance assessment for each given collection to obtain the optimal parameter setting. In this paper, we tackle the collection-dependence problem by proposing a new tuning method by measuring the normalisation effect. The proposed method refines and extends our methodology described in [7]. In our experiments, we evaluate our proposed tuning method on various TREC collections, for both the normalisation 2 of the Divergence From Randomness (DFR) models and the BM25’s normalisation method. Results show that for both normalisation methods, our tuning method significantly outperforms the robust empirically-obtained baselines over diverse TREC collections, while having a marginal computational cost.