John Lafferty

A Study of Smoothing Methods for Language Models Applied to Ad Hoc Information Retrieval

2017 · ACM SIGIR Forum

Language modeling approaches to information retrieval are attractive and promising because they connect the problem of retrieval with that of language model estimation, which has been studied extensively in other application areas such as speech …

A Probabilistic Graphical Model-based Approach for Minimizing Energy Under Performance Constraints

2015 · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News

In many deployments, computer systems are underutilized -- meaning that applications have performance requirements that demand less than full system capacity. Ideally, we would take advantage of this under-utilization by allocating system resources so that …

Information Retrieval as Statistical Translation

2017 · ACM SIGIR Forum

We propose a new probabilistic approach to information retrieval based upon the ideas and methods of statistical machine translation. The central ingredient in this approach is a statistical model of how a user might distill …

Document Language Models, Query Models, and Risk Minimization for Information Retrieval

2017 · ACM SIGIR Forum

We present a framework for information retrieval that combines document models and query models using a probabilistic ranking function based on Bayesian decision theory. The framework suggests an operational retrieval model that extends recent developments …