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What can quantum theory bring to information retrieval

  • Ingo Frommholz
    ,
  • Benjamin Piwowarski
    ,
  • Mounia Lalmas
    ,
  • Keith Van Rijsbergen
  • University of Glasgow
Research Output:
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding
Conference contribution
 Peer-review

Abstract

The probabilistic formalism of quantum physics is said to provide a sound basis for building a principled information retrieval framework. Such a framework can be based on the notion of information need vector spaces where events, such as document relevance or observed user interactions, correspond to subspaces. As in quantum theory, a probability distribution over these subspaces is defined through weighted sets of state vectors (density operators), and used to represent the current view of the retrieval system on the user information need. Tensor spaces can be used to capture different aspects of information needs. Our evaluation shows that the framework can lead to acceptable performance in an ad-hoc retrieval task. Going beyond this, we discuss the potential of the framework for three active challenges in information retrieval, namely, interaction, novelty and diversity.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output:
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding
Conference contribution
 Peer-review

Original language

English

Publication milestones

  • Published - 01/01/2010

Publication status

Published - 01/01/2010

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery, United States

ISBN (Print)

9781450300995

ISBN (Electronic)

9781450300995

Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/279159
  • Scopus: 78651324881

Host publication title

nan

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