Abstract

In information retrieval, pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) refers to a strategy for updating the query model using the top retrieved documents. PRF has been proven to be highly e↵ective in improving the retrieval performance. In this pa- per, we look at the PRF task as a recommendation problem: the goal is to recommend a number of terms for a given query along with weights, such that the final weights of terms in the updated query model better reflect the terms’ contribu- tions in the query. To do so, we propose RFMF, a PRF framework based on matrix factorization which is a state- of-the-art technique in collaborative recommender systems. Our purpose is to predict the weight of terms that have not appeared in the query and matrix factorization techniques are used to predict these weights. In RFMF, we first create a matrix whose elements are computed using a weight func- tion that shows how much a term discriminates the query or the top retrieved documents from the collection. Then, we re-estimate the created matrix using a matrix factoriza- tion technique. Finally, the query model is updated using the re-estimated matrix. RFMF is a general framework that can be employed with any retrieval model. In this paper, we implement this framework for two widely used document re- trieval frameworks: language modeling and the vector space model. Extensive experiments over several TREC collec- tions demonstrate that the RFMF framework significantly outperforms competitive baselines. These results indicate the potential of using other recommendation techniques in this task.