Methods for fusing document lists that were
retrieved in response to a query often utilize the retrieval scores and/or
ranks of documents in the lists. We present a novel fusion approach that is
based on using, in addition, information induced from inter-document
similar- ities. Specifically, our methods let similar documents from different
lists provide relevance-status support to each other. We use a graph-based
method to model relevance-status propagation between documents. The propagation
is governed by inter-document-similarities and by retrieval scores of documents
in the lists. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our
methods in fusing TREC runs.
The performance of our most effective methods
transcends that of effective fusion methods that utilize only retrieval scores
or ranks.
