Comments on: A Bird in the Hand… http://irgupf.com/2009/08/24/a-bird-in-the-hand/ Information Retrieval Research, Issues, and Discussion Tue, 14 Jun 2011 14:26:42 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 By: jeremy http://irgupf.com/2009/08/24/a-bird-in-the-hand/comment-page-1/#comment-4132 jeremy Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:40:51 +0000 http://irgupf.com/?p=83#comment-4132 I hesitate to call Google's "find similar" a form of relevance feedback. Rather, I would call it a form of "query by document example". The reason I don't think that it is relevance feedback is that it doesn't actually rerank or augment your original search result list. Rather, it issues a new query, and pulls back a completely new list. Relevance feedback (at least as far as I understand it) is more about augmentation and adjustment than wholesale replacement. But I agree with the second half of what you said; passage-level feedback, whether you're really doing feedback or doing a wholesale new query-by-passage query, is more useful than full-document feedback. I hesitate to call Google’s “find similar” a form of relevance feedback. Rather, I would call it a form of “query by document example”.

The reason I don’t think that it is relevance feedback is that it doesn’t actually rerank or augment your original search result list. Rather, it issues a new query, and pulls back a completely new list.

Relevance feedback (at least as far as I understand it) is more about augmentation and adjustment than wholesale replacement.

But I agree with the second half of what you said; passage-level feedback, whether you’re really doing feedback or doing a wholesale new query-by-passage query, is more useful than full-document feedback.

]]> By: Gene Golovchinsky http://irgupf.com/2009/08/24/a-bird-in-the-hand/comment-page-1/#comment-4127 Gene Golovchinsky Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:00:07 +0000 http://irgupf.com/?p=83#comment-4127 One form of relevance feedback available on Google is the 'similar' link that is found next to some (but not all?) search results. The problem is that it does one-shot, document-level relevance feedback, which means that the system doesn't really know what aspects of the document you found useful. Passage-level feedback would serve most people's needs better; more elaborate schemes that accrue evidence over multiple documents are difficult to get right due to <a href="http://palblog.fxpal.com/?p=1398" rel="nofollow">hidden dependencies and viscosity</a> associated with relevance feedback. One form of relevance feedback available on Google is the ‘similar’ link that is found next to some (but not all?) search results. The problem is that it does one-shot, document-level relevance feedback, which means that the system doesn’t really know what aspects of the document you found useful. Passage-level feedback would serve most people’s needs better; more elaborate schemes that accrue evidence over multiple documents are difficult to get right due to hidden dependencies and viscosity associated with relevance feedback.

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