This paper presents a new discriminative model for information retrieval (IR), referred to as linear discriminant model (LDM), which provides a flexible framework to incorporate arbitrary features. LDM is different from most existing models in that it takes into account a variety of linguistic features that are derived from the component models of HMM that is widely used in language modeling approaches to IR. Therefore, LDM is a means of melding discriminative and generative models for IR. We present two algorithms of parameter learning for LDM. One is to optimize the average precision (AP) directly using an iterative procedure. The other is a perceptron-based algorithm that minimizes the number of discordant document-pairs in a rank list. The effectiveness of our approach has been evaluated on the task of ad hoc retrieval using six English and Chinese TREC test sets. Results show that (1) in most test sets, LDM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art language modeling approaches and the classical probabilistic retrieval model; (2) it is more appropriate to train LDM using a measure of AP rather than likelihood if the IR system is graded on AP; and (3) linguistic features (e.g. phrases and dependences) are effective for IR if they are incorporated properly.

This paper presents a Chinese word segmentation system which can adapt to different domains and standards. We first present a statistical framework where domain-specific words are identified in a unified approach to word segmentation based on linear models. We explore several features and describe how to create training data by sampling. We then describe a transformation-based learning method used to adapt our system to different word segmentation standards. Evaluation of the proposed system on five test sets with different standards shows that the system achieves state- of-the-art performance on all of them.