Parsimonious Relevance Models for Multiple Corpora

We describe a method for applying parsimonious language models to re-estimate the term probabilities assigned by relevance models. We apply our method to six topic sets from test collections in five different genres. Our parsimonious relevance models (i) improve retrieval effectiveness in terms of MAP on all collections, (ii) significantly outperform their non-parsimonious counterparts on most measures, and (iii) have a precision enhancing effect, unlike other blind relevance feedback methods.