Unsupervised learning to fuse for information retrieval

An apparatus comprising:

• a memory;
• and
• at least one processor, coupled to said memory, and operative to perform operations comprising:
• evaluating, using a plurality of rankers, a query on a corpus of documents using a plurality of retrieval methods corresponding to the plurality of rankers;
• obtaining a ranked list for each of the plurality of retrieval methods;
• generating a plurality of fused ranked lists;
• sampling the plurality of fused ranked lists, each fused ranked list fusing said ranked lists for said plurality of retrieval methods;
• sorting said sampled fused ranked lists;
• in an unsupervised manner, optimizing an objective comprising a likelihood that a fused ranked list, fusing said ranked lists for each of said plurality of retrieval methods, is relevant to a query and a relevance event, to optimize said sampling, until convergence is achieved;
• determining documents of the fused ranked list based on the optimization;
• and
• generating a user interface for displaying an identification of the documents of the fused ranked list.

A non-transitory computer readable medium comprising computer executable instructions which when executed by a computer cause the computer to perform operations comprising:

• evaluating, using a plurality of rankers, a query on a corpus of documents using a plurality of retrieval methods corresponding to the plurality of rankers;
• obtaining a ranked list for each of the plurality of retrieval methods;
• generating a plurality of fused ranked lists;
• sampling the plurality of fused ranked lists, each fused ranked list fusing said ranked lists for said plurality of retrieval methods;
• sorting said sampled fused ranked lists;
• in an unsupervised manner, optimizing an objective comprising a likelihood that a fused ranked list, fusing said ranked lists for each of said plurality of retrieval methods, is relevant to a query and a relevance event, to optimize said sampling, until convergence is achieved;
• determining documents of the fused ranked list based on the optimization;
• and
• generating a user interface for displaying an identification of the documents of the fused ranked list.