Rhetorical relations for information retrieval

TY - GEN

T1 - Rhetorical relations for information retrieval

AU - Lioma, Christina

AU - Larsen, Birger

AU - Lu, Wei

N1 - Conference code: 35

PY - 2012

Y1 - 2012

N2 - Typically, every part in most coherent text has some plausible reason for its presence, some function that it performs to the overall semantics of the text. Rhetorical relations, e.g. contrast, cause, explanation, describe how the parts of a text are linked to each other. Knowledge about this so-called discourse structure has been applied successfully to several natural language processing tasks. This work studies the use of rhetorical relations for Information Retrieval (IR): Is there a correlation between certain rhetorical relations and retrieval performance? Can knowledge about a document’s rhetorical relations be useful to IR?We present a language model modification that considers rhetorical relations when estimating the relevance of a document to a query. Empirical evaluation of different versions of our model on TREC settings shows that certain rhetorical relations can benefit retrieval effectiveness notably (> 10%in mean average precision over a state-of-the-art baseline).

AB - Typically, every part in most coherent text has some plausible reason for its presence, some function that it performs to the overall semantics of the text. Rhetorical relations, e.g. contrast, cause, explanation, describe how the parts of a text are linked to each other. Knowledge about this so-called discourse structure has been applied successfully to several natural language processing tasks. This work studies the use of rhetorical relations for Information Retrieval (IR): Is there a correlation between certain rhetorical relations and retrieval performance? Can knowledge about a document’s rhetorical relations be useful to IR?We present a language model modification that considers rhetorical relations when estimating the relevance of a document to a query. Empirical evaluation of different versions of our model on TREC settings shows that certain rhetorical relations can benefit retrieval effectiveness notably (> 10%in mean average precision over a state-of-the-art baseline).

U2 - 10.1145/2348283.2348407

DO - 10.1145/2348283.2348407

M3 - Article in proceedings

SP - 931

EP - 940

BT - Proceedings of the 35th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

T2 - 35th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Y2 - 12 August 2012 through 16 August 2012

ER -