Discovering Ranking Functions for Information Retrieval

Abstract

The field of information retrieval deals with finding relevant documents from a large document collection or the World Wide Web in response to a user’s query seeking relevant information. Ranking functions play a very important role in the retrieval performance of such retrieval systems and search engines. A single ranking function does not perform well across different user queries, and document collections. Hence it is necessary to “discover” a ranking function for a particular context. Adaptive algorithms like genetic programming (GP) are well suited for such discovery.