Improving retrieval accuracy of difficult queries through generalizing negative document language models

When a query topic is difficult and the search results are very poor, negative feedback is a very useful method to improve the retrieval accuracy and user experience. One challenge in negative feedback is that negative documents tend to be distracting in different ways, thus as training examples, negative examples are sparse. In this paper, we solve the problem of data sparseness in the language modeling framework. We propose an optimization framework, in which we learn from a few top-ranked non-relevant examples, and search in a large space of all language models to build a more general negative language model. This general negative language model has more power in pruning the non-relevant documents, thus potentially improving the performance for difficult queries. Experiment results on representative TREC collections show that the proposed optimization framework can improve negative feedback performance over the state-of-the-art negative feedback method through generalizing negative language models.