Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Method Based on the Topic Relevance Model

In the field of information retrieval, most pseudo-relevance feedback models select candidate terms from the top k documents returned by the first-pass retrieval, but they cannot identify the reliability of these documents. This paper proposed a new approach to obtain feedback information more comprehensively by constructing four corresponding models. Firstly, the algorithm incorporated topic-based relevance information into the relevance model RM3 and constructed a topic-based relevance model, denoted as TopRM3, with two corresponding variants. TopRM3 estimated the reliability of a feedback document in language modeling when executing pseudo-relevance feedback from both term and topic-based perspectives. Secondly, the algorithm introduced topic-based relevance information into Rocchio’s model and constructed the corresponding model, denoted as TopRoc, with two corresponding variants. Experimental results on the five TREC collections show that the proposed TopRM3 and TopRoc are effective and generally superior to the state-of-the-art pseudo-relevance feedback models with optimal parameter settings in terms of mean average precision.