Study for fusion of different sources to determine relevance

The relevance of a Web document could be measured not only by its text content, but also by some other factors such as the link connectivity and usage patterns. In previous data fusion researches, the text is the only source to determine the relevance, and only the different runs (e.g. by different retrieval models, different query or document representations) on this same source are combined. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate whether the different sources can be combined to determine the relevance with a better accuracy than any single source. We conducted a preliminary experiment to test its feasibility and effectiveness and a positive result was obtained.