Selective Query Processing: A Risk-Sensitive Selection of Search Configurations

In information retrieval systems, search parameters are optimized to ensure high effectiveness based on a set of past searches and these optimized parameters are then used as the system configuration for all subsequent queries. A better approach, however, would be to adapt the parameters to fit the query at hand. Selective query expansion is one such an approach, in which the system decides automatically whether or not to expand the query, resulting in two possible system configurations. This approach was extended recently to include many other parameters, leading to many possible system configurations where the system automatically selects the best configuration on a per-query basis. One problem with this approach is the system training which requires evaluation of each training query with every possible configuration. In real-world systems, so many parameters and possible values must be evaluated that this approach is impractical, especially when the system must be updated frequently, as is the case for commercial search engines. In general, the more configurations, the greater the effectiveness when configuration selection is appropriate but also the greater the risk of decreasing effectiveness in the case of an inappropriate configuration selection. To determine the ideal configurations to use on a per-query basis in real-world systems we developed a method in which a restricted number of possible configurations is pre-selected and then used in a meta-search engine that decides the best search configuration on a per query basis. We define a risk-sensitive approach for configuration pre-selection that considers the risk-reward trade-off between the number of configurations kept, and system effectiveness. We define two alternative risk functions to apply to different goals. For final configuration selection, the decision is based on query feature similarities. We compare two alternative risk functions on two query types: ad hoc and diversity and compare these to more sophisticated machine learning-based methods. We find that a relatively small number of configurations (20) selected by our risk-sensitive model is sufficient to obtain results close to the best achievable results for each query. Effectiveness is increased by about 15% according to the P@10 and nDCG@10 evaluation metrics when compared to traditional grid search using a single configuration and by about 20% when compared to learning to rank documents. Our risk-sensitive approach works for both diversity- and ad hoc-oriented searches. Moreover, the similarity-based selection method outperforms the more sophisticated approaches. Thus, we demonstrate the feasibility of developing per-query information retrieval systems, which will guide future research in this direction