Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15 (NIPS 2002)
Bin Wu, K. Wong, David Bodoff
We study an explicit parametric model of documents, queries, and rel- evancy assessment for Information Retrieval (IR). Mean-field methods are applied to analyze the model and derive efficient practical algorithms to estimate the parameters in the problem. The hyperparameters are es- timated by a fast approximate leave-one-out cross-validation procedure based on the cavity method. The algorithm is further evaluated on several benchmark databases by comparing with standard algorithms in IR.