David Carmel

Estimating the Query Difficulty for Information Retrieval - Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services David Carmel

Discusses the reasons that cause search engines to fail for some queries, and then reviews recent approaches for estimating query difficulty in the IR field. The book then describes a common methodology for evaluating the prediction quality of those estimators, and experiments with some of the predictors applied by various IR methods over several TREC benchmarks.