Neural Relevance Feedback for Information Retrieval

Relevance feedback is a technique used in interactive Information Retrieval (IR) systems to enable a user to provide additional information to help the system identify more relevant documents. The additional information is provided in the form of relevance judgements on retrieved documents. One of the most advanced relevance feedback technique in operative IR system is based on a probabilistic function. Recent results show that it is possible to implement relevance feedback also using neural networks. This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation into the use of the Back Propagation learning algorithm for implementing relevance feedback. The investigation compares the performance of the proposed neural relevance feedback technique against to and in combination with probabilistic relevance feedback. The results obtained seem to indicate that, while probabilistic relevance feedback often outperforms neural relevance feedback, the combination of the two techniques is more effective than both techniques taken separately.