International Business Machines Corporation

Adam Darlow

David Carmel

Elad Yom-Tov

Shai Fine

Dan S Pelleg

Aya Soffer

Yael Petruschka

A method and system are provided of merging results in distributed information retrieval. A search manager is in communication with a plurality of components, wherein a component is a search engine working on a document collection and returning results in the form of a list of documents to a search query. The search manager submits a query to the plurality of components, receives results from each component in the form of a list of documents; estimates the success of a component in handling the query to generate a merit score for a component per query; applies the merit score to the results for the component; and merges results from the plurality of components by ranking in order of the applied merit score.

Merging of results in distributed information retrieval

A method and system for analyzing a document set () are provided. The method includes determining a set of terms () from the terms of the document set that minimizes a distance measurement () from the given set of documents (). The method includes using a greedy algorithm to build the set of terms incrementally, at each stage finding a single word that is closest to the document set (). The set of terms is evaluated to assess the ability to find the document set (). The set of terms are compared with expected terms to evaluate the ability to find the document set (). A measure of the ability to find a document set () is provided by computing a distance measure () between a document set and an entire collection.

Analyzing the ability to find textual content

A method for searching a document collection includes providing an index of terms indicating the documents in which the terms appear. A first statistical distribution of each of at least some of the terms in the index and a second statistical distribution of each of at least some of the categories are estimated a over the documents in the collection. A query including one or more of the terms and a category restriction referring to at least one of the categories is accepted. A modified term distribution is produced by operating on the first statistical distribution of at least one of the terms in the query using the second statistical distribution, responsively to the category restriction. The query is applied to the index to return a response, in which occurrences of the at least one of the terms are scored responsively to the modified term distribution.

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Haifa, Israel

Adam Darlow