A database approach to information retrieval: The remarkable relationship between language models and region models [article]

Djoerd Hiemstra, Vojkan Mihajlovic
2010 arXiv   pre-print
In this report, we unify two quite distinct approaches to information retrieval: region models and language models. Region models were developed for structured document retrieval. They provide a well-defined behaviour as well as a simple query language that allows application developers to rapidly develop applications. Language models are particularly useful to reason about the ranking of search results, and for developing new ranking approaches. The unified model allows application developers
more » ... o define complex language modeling approaches as logical queries on a textual database. We show a remarkable one-to-one relationship between region queries and the language models they represent for a wide variety of applications: simple ad-hoc search, cross-language retrieval, video retrieval, and web search.
arXiv:1005.4752v1 fatcat:5yy3htoatjbe5jnc4achfdgkzu