Details
-
Improvement
-
Status: Resolved
-
Major
-
Resolution: Incomplete
-
2.2
-
None
-
None
-
Patch Available
Description
We implemented the axiomatic retrieval function, which is a state-of-the-art retrieval function, to
replace the default similarity function in Lucene. We compared the performance of these two functions and reported the results at http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/hfang/lucene/Lucene_exp.pdf.
The report shows that the performance of the axiomatic retrieval function is much better than the default function. The axiomatic retrieval function is able to find more relevant documents and users can see more relevant documents in the top-ranked documents. Incorporating such a state-of-the-art retrieval function could improve the search performance of all the applications which were built upon Lucene.
Most changes related to the implementation are made in AXSimilarity, TermScorer and TermQuery.java. However, many test cases are hand coded to test whether the implementation of the default function is correct. Thus, I also made the modification to many test files to make the new retrieval function pass those cases. In fact, we found that some old test cases are not reasonable. For example, in the testQueries02 of TestBoolean2.java,
the query is "+w3 xx", and we have two documents "w1 xx w2 yy w3" and "w1 w3 xx w2 yy w3".
The second document should be more relevant than the first one, because it has more
occurrences of the query term "w3". But the original test case would require us to rank
the first document higher than the second one, which is not reasonable.