Preferential Infinitesimals for Information Retrieval

In this paper, we propose a preference framework for information retrieval in which the user and the system administrator are enabled to express preference annotations on search keywords and document elements, respectively. Our framework is flexible and allows expressing preferences such as “A is infinitely more preferred than B,” which we capture by using hyperreal numbers. Due to the widespread of XML as a standard for representing documents, we consider XML documents in this paper and propose a consistent preferential weighting scheme for nested document elements. We show how to naturally incorporate preferences on search keywords and document elements into an IR ranking process using the well-known TF-IDF ranking measure.