Re-ranking method based on inter-document distances

Lately there has been intensive research into the possibilities of using additional information about documents (such as hyperlinks) to improve retrieval effectiveness. It is called data fusion, based on the intuitive principle that different document and query representations or different methods lead to a better estimation of the documents' relevance scores. In this paper we propose a new method of document re-ranking that enables us to improve document scores using inter-document relationships. These relationships are expressed by distances and can be obtained from the text, hyperlinks or other information. The method formalizes the intuition that strongly related documents should not be assigned very different weights. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.