Late Data Fusion for Microblog Search

The character of microblog environments raises challenges for microblog search because relevancy becomes one of the many aspects for ranking documents. We concentrate on merging multiple ranking strategies at postretrieval time for the TREC Microblog task. We compare several state-of-the-art late data fusion methods, and present a new semi-supervised variant that accounts for microblog characteristics. Our experiments show the utility of late data fusion in microblog search, and that our method helps boost retrieval effectiveness.