SVM-based interactive document retrieval with active learning

This paper describes an application of SVM (Support Vector Machines) to interactive document retrieval using active learning. Some works have been done to apply classification learning like SVM to relevance feedback and have obtained successful results. However they did not fully utilize characteristic of example distribution in document retrieval. We propose heuristics to bias document showing for user's judgement according to distribution of examples in document retrieval. This heuristics is executed by selecting examples to show a user in neighbors of positive support vectors, and it improves learning efficiency. We implemented a SVM-based interactive document retrieval system using our proposed heuristics, and compared it with conventional systems like Rocchio-based system and a SVM-based system without the heuristics. We conducted systematic experiments using large data sets including over 500,000 newspaper articles and confirmed our system outperformed other ones.