Incremental Relevance Feedback

Abstract

Although relevance feedback techniques have been investigated for more than 20 years, hardly any of these techniques has been implemented in a commercial full-text document retrieval system. In addition to pure performance problems, this is due to the fact that the application of relevance feedback techniques increases the complexity of the user interface and thus also the use of a document retrieval system. In this paper we concentrate on a relevance feedback technique that allows easily understandable and manageable user interfaces, and at the same time provides high-quality retrieval results. Moreover, the relevance feedback technique introduced unifies as well as improves other well-known relevance feedback techniques.