Effective sentence retrieval based on query-independent evidence

In this paper we propose an effective sentence retrieval method that consists of incorporating query-independent features into standard sentence retrieval models. To meet this aim, we apply a formal methodology and consider different query-independent features. In particular, we show that opinion-based features are promising. Opinion mining is an increasingly important research topic but little is known about how to improve retrieval algorithms with opinion-based components. In this respect, we consider here different kinds of opinion-based features to act as query-independent evidence and study whether this incorporation improves retrieval performance. On the other hand, information needs are usually related to people, locations or organizations. We hypothesize here that using these named entities as query-independent features may also improve the sentence relevance estimation. Finally, the length of the retrieval unit has been shown to be an important component in different retrieval scenarios. We therefore include length-based features in our study.Our evaluation demonstrates that, either in isolation or in combination, these query-independent features help to improve substantially the performance of state-of-the-art sentence retrieval methods.

► Incorporation of query-independent features into standard sentence retrieval models, following a formal methodology.
► Study of named entities, opinions and sentence length as query-independent features.
► Opinion-based features help significantly to estimate relevance.
► Named entities do not help substantially to improve performance.
► Combining sentence length with opinion-based features yields to further improvements.