Massimo Melucci (Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, IT)

Abstract
 

In the related literature and in particular in the recent book by van Rijsbergen, it was hypothesized that a more general framework used to formalize quantum mechanics, and then quantum probability, would be useful for going beyond the classical retrieval models. This paper first discusses a situation in which that framework, and then quantum probability, can be necessary in Information Retrieval and then describes the experiments designed to this end. The necessity of considering quantum probability stemmed from the experimental observation carried out in this paper that the best terms for query expansion have probability which does not admit classical probability and which instead can be defined within a quantum probability function.