Dempster-Shafer Theory for a Query-Biased Combination of Evidence on the Web

This paper reports on a large-scale experiment for the evaluation of a formal query-biased combination of evidence mechanism. We use the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence to combine optimally results obtained by content and link analyses on the Web. The query-biased mechanism is based on the query scope, a measure of the query specificity. The query scope is defined using a probabilistic propagation mechanism on top of the hierarchical structure of concepts provided by WordNet. We use two standard Web test collections and two different link analysis approaches. The results show that the proposed approach could improve the retrieval effectiveness.