A Comparative Study of Utilizing Topic Models for Information Retrieval

We explore the utility of different types of topic models for retrieval purposes. Based on prior work, we describe several ways that topic models can be integrated into the retrieval process. We evaluate the effectiveness of different types of topic models within those retrieval approaches. We show that: (1) topic models are effective for document smoothing; (2) more rigorous topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation provide gains over cluster-based models; (3) more elaborate topic models that capture topic dependencies provide no additional gains; (4) smoothing documents by using their similar documents is as effective as smoothing them by using topic models; (5) doing query expansion should utilize topics discovered in the feedback documents instead of coarse-grained topics from the whole corpus; (6) generally, incorporating topics in the feedback documents for building relevance models can benefit the performance more for queries that have more relevant documents.