AN INVESTIGATION OF THE CONDITIONS FOR EFFECTIVE DATA FUSION IN INFORMATION RETREIVAL By KWONG

............................................................................. ii Acknowledgements ................................................................ iv Dedication ........................................................................... v List of Tables ....................................................................... xi List of Figures ...................................................................... xiv Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................ 1 1.1 Information Retrieval Systems and Schemes ......................... 1 1.2 Data Fusion ............................................................... 3 1.3 Data Fusion in IR ......................................................... 4 1.3.1 Data Fusion Vs Database Merging and Collection fusion ... 4 1.3.2 Combination of Data Vs Combination of Queries ............ 5 1.3.3 Data Fusion Approaches in IR .................................... 6 1.4 Brief Review of Some Successful Data Fusion Experiment ........ 11 1.5 Organization of This Thesis ............................................. 13 Chapter 2: Theoretical Foundation of Data Fusion in IR ..................... 15 2.1 The Improved Recall Argument ........................................ 15 2.2 The Improved Precision Argument ..................................... 20