MARS: Multiplicative Adaptive Refinement Web Search

Abstract

This chapter reports the project MARS (Multiplicative Adaptive Refinement Search), which applies a new multiplicative adaptive algorithm for user preference retrieval to Web searches. The new algorithm uses a multiplicative query expansion strategy to adaptively improve and reformulate the query vector to learn users’ information preference. The algorithm has provable better performance than the popular Rocchio’s similarity-based relevance feedback algorithm in learning a user preference that is determined by a linear classifier with a small number of non-zero coefficients over the real-valued vector space. A meta-search engine based on the aforementioned algorithm is built, and analysis of its search performance is presented.