Combining pre-retrieval query quality predictors using genetic programming

Abstract

Predicting the effectiveness of queries plays an important role in information retrieval. In recent years, a number of methods are proposed for this task, however, there has been little work done on combining multiple predictors. Previous studies on combining multiple predictors rely on non-backtracking based machine learning methods. These studies show minor improvement over single predictors due to the limitation of non-backtracking. This paper discusses work on using machine learning to automatically generate an effective predictors’ combination for query performance prediction. This task is referred to as—learning to predict for query performance prediction in the field. In this paper, a learning method, PredGP, is presented to address this task. PredGP employs genetic programming to learn a predictor by combining various pre-retrieval predictors. The proposed method is evaluated using the TREC Chemical Prior-Art Retrieval Task dataset and found to be significantly better than single predictors.