Supporting Polyrepresentation in a Quantum-inspired geometrical Retrieval Framework

Ingo Frommholz, Birger Larsen, Benjamin Piwowarski, Mounia Lalmas, Peter Ingwersen, Keith van Rijsbergen

Research output: Contribution to book/anthology/report/conference proceedingArticle in proceedingResearchpeer-review

30 Citations (Scopus)
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Abstract

The relevance of a document has many facets, going beyond the usual topical one, which have to be considered to satisfy a user's information need. Multiple representations of documents, like user-given reviews or the actual document content, can give evidence towards certain facets of relevance. In this respect polyrepresentation of documents, where such evidence is combined, is a crucial concept to estimate the relevance of a document. In this paper, we discuss how a geometrical retrieval framework inspired by quantum mechanics can be extended to support polyrepresentation. We show by example how different representations of a document can be modelled in a Hilbert space, similar to physical systems known from quantum mechanics. We further illustrate how these representations are combined by means of the tensor product to support polyrepresentation, and discuss the case that representations of documents are not independent from a user point of view. Besides giving a principled framework for polyrepresentation, the potential of this approach is to capture and formalise the complex interdependent relationships that the different representations can have between each other.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIIiX'10 Proceeding of the Third Symposium on Information Interaction in Context, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, August 18-21, 2010
EditorsNicholas J. Belkin, Diane Kelly
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publication date2010
Pages115-124
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-0247-0
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes

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