Re-ranking with context for high-performance biomedical information retrieval

In this paper, we present a context-sensitive approach to re-ranking retrieved documents for further improving the effectiveness of high-performance biomedical literature retrieval systems. For each topic, a two-dimensional positive context is learnt from the top N retrieved documents and a group of negative contexts are learnt from the last N documents in initial retrieval ranked list. The contextual space contains lexical context and conceptual context. The probabilities that retrieved documents are generated within the contextual space are then computed for document re-ranking. Empirical evaluation on the TREC Genomics full-text collection and three high-performance biomedical literature retrieval runs demonstrates that the context-sensitive re-ranking approach yields better retrieval performance.