Probabilistic co-relevance for query-sensitive similarity measurement in information retrieval

► We suggest a probabilistic framework that defines query-sensitive similarity. ► The proposed similarity is based on the probability that documents are co-relevant to a given query. ► This work uses language modeling approaches to derive the co-relevance-based similarity. ► Experiment results show that the proposed co-relevance-based similarity is effective. Interdocument similarities are the fundamental information source required in cluster-based retrieval, which is an advanced retrieval approach that significantly improves performance during information retrieval (IR). An effective similarity metric is query-sensitive similarity, which was introduced by Tombros and Rijsbergen as method to more directly satisfy the cluster hypothesis that forms the basis of cluster-based retrieval. Although this method is reported to be effective, existing applications of query-specific similarity are still limited to vector space models wherein there is no connection to probabilistic approaches. We suggest a probabilistic framework that defines query-sensitive similarity based on probabilistic co-relevance, where the similarity between two documents is proportional to the probability that they are both co-relevant to a specific given query. We further simplify the proposed co-relevance-based similarity by decomposing it into two separate relevance models. We then formulate all the requisite components for the proposed similarity metric in terms of scoring functions used by language modeling methods. Experimental results obtained using standard TREC test collections consistently showed that the proposed query-sensitive similarity measure performs better than term-based similarity and existing query-sensitive similarity in the context of Voorhees’ nearest neighbor test (NNT).