Learning filtering rulesets for ranking refinement in relevance feedback

In this paper we propose an approach for refining a document ranking by learning filtering rulesets through relevance feedback. This approach includes two important procedures. One is a filtering method, which can be incorporated into any kinds of information retrieval systems. The other is a learning algorithm to make a set of filtering rules, each of which specifies a condition to identify relevant documents using combinations of characteristic words. Our approach is useful not only to overcome the limitation of the vector space model, but also to utilize tags of semi-structured documents like Web pages. Through experiments we show our approach improves the performance of relevance feedback in two types of IR systems adopting the vector space model and a Web search engine, respectively.