Improving the context-based influence diagram model for structured document retrieval: removing topological restrictions and adding new evaluation methods

In this paper we present the theoretical developments necessary to extend the existing Context-based Influence Diagram Model for Structured Documents (CID model), in order to improve its retrieval performance and expressiveness. Firstly, we make it more flexible and general by removing the original restrictions on the type of structured documents that CID represents. This extension requires the design of a new algorithm to compute the posterior probabilities of relevance. Another contribution is related to the evaluation of the influence diagram. The computation of the expected utilities in the original CID model was approximated by applying an independence criterion. We present another approximation that does not assume independence, as well as an exact evaluation method.