Text-Based Information Retrieval Using Exponentiated Gradient Descent

The following investigates the use of single-neuron learning algorithms to improve the performance of text-retrieval systems that accept natural-language queries. A retrieval process is explained that transforms the natural-language query into the query syntax of a real retrieval system: the initial query is expanded using statistical and learning techniques and is then used for document ranking and binary classification. The results of experiments suggest that Kivinen and Warmuth's Exponentiated Gradient Descent learning algorithm works significantly better than previous approaches. 1 Introduction The following work explores two learning algorithms - Least Mean Squared (LMS) [1] and Exponentiated Gradient Descent (EG) [2] - in the context of text-based Information Retrieval (IR) systems. The experiments presented in [3] use connectionist learning models to improve the retrieval of relevant documents from a large collection of text. Previous work in the area employs various techniques for improving retrieval [6, 7, 14].