[Xapian-discuss] Fwd: Change document relevance on user feedback

[Benjamin Hille]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Benjamin Hille <benjamin at hille.me.uk>
Date: Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 4:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Xapian-discuss] Change document relevance on user feedback
To: Richard Boulton <richard at lemurconsulting.com>


Yes, this is supported by Xapian.
>
Excellent I thought so.

>
> Briefly, the API allows you to supply a relevance set to the match process
> (which is a set of documents marked as relevant).  It also allows a
> relevance set to be used to calculate a set of expansion terms (ie, terms
> which might be useful to add to the query to find documents similar to those
> marked as relevant).
>
do you use the RSet class to say "this Document is more relevant for this
query" ?

>
>
> http://xapian.org/search.php supports this method of feedback - each
> result has a checkbox - if you click the checkbox and then click the
> "Search" button again, the termweights will be adjusted based on the new
> information, and results will be recalculated.  For small queries, this
> often doesn't produce much direct improvement, because only the weights of
> the terms are modified, so two documents which match the same terms will
> often remain ranked in the same order, even if only one of the documents was
> relevant.
>
> However, xapian also supports calculation of a list of suggested
> "expansion" terms, which are displayed at the top of the screen in this
> case.  These terms will also be updated based on the relevance information.
>  You can click the boxes by these terms to add them to the query, but an
> alternative implementation is to simply add such terms automatically to the
> query ("behind the scenes", so that the user doesn't see them), which is
> more limited, but may be an easier interface for users.


On the xapian search page when the user click the box "this document is
relevant", how do you update the index to reflect this?

Thanks for your helpl
Benjamin


>
>
> --
> Richard
>