A Novel Re-ranking Approach Inspired by Quantum Measurement

Quantum theory (QT) has recently been employed to advance the theory of information retrieval (IR). A typical method, namely the Quantum Probability Ranking Principle (QPRP), was proposed to re-rank top retrieved documents by considering the inter-dependencies between documents through the “quantum interference”. In this paper, we attempt to explore another important QT concept, namely the “quantum measurement”. Inspired by the photon polarization experiment underpinning the “quantum measurement”, we propose a novel re-ranking approach. Evaluation on several TREC data sets shows that in ad-hoc retrieval, our method can significantly improve the first-round ranking from a baseline retrieval model, and also outperform the QPRP.