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You either has or has no guarantee, that's what the word "guarantee" means. Don't mince words. You had a wrong understanding. Now you are corrected. Let's move

You either has or has no guarantee, that's what the word "guarantee" means. Don't mince words. You had a wrong understanding. Now you are corrected. Let's move on. Nobody said anything about "fewer term matches could not be more relevant". You are just making up straw men here. That's not the discussion we are having. What I said is this, from a user point of view, it's not good to have a document containing fewer query terms to rank higher. This is a fact that even Lucene acknowledge (at least when they were version 3.5.0.). You have nothing to counter this fact.

softwaredoug 5y ago
But you’re arguing that such a guarantee ALWAYS is most relevant. When that’s not always the case. There’s been extensive research justification behind the vector-space model. BM25 is the 25th iteration of a model and well tuned BM25 holds the highest non nueral performance on many tasks including question answering[1]. Research has long found including factors other than total term matches matters. Such as IDF[2] and field length[3]. Have you benchmarked your relevance assumptions similarly? If so I’d love to see them and learn more! 1 - https://www.elastic.co/blog/improving-search-relevance-with-data-driven-query-optimization https://www.elastic.co/blog/improving-search-relevance-with-... 2- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238123710_Understanding_Inverse_Document_Frequency_On_Theoretical_Arguments_for_IDF https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238123710_Understan... 3 - http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/course/410s12/mir.pdf http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/course/410s12/mir.pdf
- huahaiy 5y ago
  You are making up straw man again. Did I make that claim? I was simply motivate my work, pointing out it's a problem that the current generation of search engine does not address. What is "relevance", it is of course a context sensitive question. You talk as if BM25 is the gold standard when it is not. The research on this is all over the place. I just read an article that says that BM25 is way worse than alternative language models. You don't have to look far, for example this one that talks about Wand: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2537734.2537744 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2537734.2537744 You know why I quit academia? It is useless arguments and virtual signalings like these. I'd rather go out and build a damn thing that people like to use. I merely pointed out that there's a problem, and I have a solution. I did not claim that my problem and my solution solve all problems. Isn't this obvious? In my problem, my solution beats Lucene. It's as simple as that. So if Lucene wants to be this infinitely configurable search library, it would be advisable to offer my solution as an option, or offer an better one that does something similar. So far I have not seen any takers, only excuses.
  - softwaredoug 5y ago
    The title of the section quoted is "Better Relevance" and I am simply saying, arguably, you can't make that claim without evidence. (That said, I do find much to like about the article and the WAND / T-WAND explanation. I'm only pointing out you can't claim 'better relevance' without a benchmark to go with it.)
    - huahaiy 5y ago
      You are mincing words again. It's a blog post we are talking about here. In order to motive the work, I have to say what benefits it will bring. Agree? It's my problem, and I get to define what is better relevance for me. In addition, this is also a well known problem acknowledge by Lucene documentation. So it is not an isolated problem. Some of the users voiced their agreement right here in comments. That's enough evidence for a blog post? If you were writing this, how would you write it? You probably do worse. I see that you work in Shopify Search, I hope that your attitude towards your users are not as hostile as this. It's the users who decide what are relevant to them, not you. I hope you remember that. Your manager will also probably agree.
      - aleben 5y ago
        Pardon my intrusion, but I think there's the necessity of toning down the discussion a bit. To be fair it is irrelevant where user A or user B works and I don't see any hostility in this discussion except the one from the blog's author. If the aim is doing Science, let's do this peacefully! I think the main problem that generated this discussion is the form of some sentences of the blog "As someone who has a Ph.D. in Human-computer Interaction ;-), I feel like I am entitled to define a condition of "good" in relevance here. I hereby declare that: A good top-K algorithm should rank a document containing more user query terms higher than a document containing less number of user query terms. This makes perfect sense. Right?" This should have been changed in: "For the sake of this blog post I am interested in a simplified relevance concept: more query terms matched -> more relevance" In this way the blog would have not caused the outburst of (correct) indignation of the Information Retrieval community, that has been working for years on the topic, and knows very well how much complex is relevance.
- deleted 5y ago
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softwaredoug 5y ago

But you’re arguing that such a guarantee ALWAYS is most relevant. When that’s not always the case. There’s been extensive research justification behind the vector-space model. BM25 is the 25th iteration of a model and well tuned BM25 holds the highest non nueral performance on many tasks including question answering[1]. Research has long found including factors other than total term matches matters. Such as IDF[2] and field length[3]. Have you benchmarked your relevance assumptions similarly? If so I’d love to see them and learn more! 1 - https://www.elastic.co/blog/improving-search-relevance-with-data-driven-query-optimization https://www.elastic.co/blog/improving-search-relevance-with-... 2- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238123710_Understanding_Inverse_Document_Frequency_On_Theoretical_Arguments_for_IDF https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238123710_Understan... 3 - http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/course/410s12/mir.pdf http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/course/410s12/mir.pdf

huahaiy 5y ago
You are making up straw man again. Did I make that claim? I was simply motivate my work, pointing out it's a problem that the current generation of search engine does not address. What is "relevance", it is of course a context sensitive question. You talk as if BM25 is the gold standard when it is not. The research on this is all over the place. I just read an article that says that BM25 is way worse than alternative language models. You don't have to look far, for example this one that talks about Wand: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2537734.2537744 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2537734.2537744 You know why I quit academia? It is useless arguments and virtual signalings like these. I'd rather go out and build a damn thing that people like to use. I merely pointed out that there's a problem, and I have a solution. I did not claim that my problem and my solution solve all problems. Isn't this obvious? In my problem, my solution beats Lucene. It's as simple as that. So if Lucene wants to be this infinitely configurable search library, it would be advisable to offer my solution as an option, or offer an better one that does something similar. So far I have not seen any takers, only excuses.
- softwaredoug 5y ago
  The title of the section quoted is "Better Relevance" and I am simply saying, arguably, you can't make that claim without evidence. (That said, I do find much to like about the article and the WAND / T-WAND explanation. I'm only pointing out you can't claim 'better relevance' without a benchmark to go with it.)
  - huahaiy 5y ago
    You are mincing words again. It's a blog post we are talking about here. In order to motive the work, I have to say what benefits it will bring. Agree? It's my problem, and I get to define what is better relevance for me. In addition, this is also a well known problem acknowledge by Lucene documentation. So it is not an isolated problem. Some of the users voiced their agreement right here in comments. That's enough evidence for a blog post? If you were writing this, how would you write it? You probably do worse. I see that you work in Shopify Search, I hope that your attitude towards your users are not as hostile as this. It's the users who decide what are relevant to them, not you. I hope you remember that. Your manager will also probably agree.
    - aleben 5y ago
      Pardon my intrusion, but I think there's the necessity of toning down the discussion a bit. To be fair it is irrelevant where user A or user B works and I don't see any hostility in this discussion except the one from the blog's author. If the aim is doing Science, let's do this peacefully! I think the main problem that generated this discussion is the form of some sentences of the blog "As someone who has a Ph.D. in Human-computer Interaction ;-), I feel like I am entitled to define a condition of "good" in relevance here. I hereby declare that: A good top-K algorithm should rank a document containing more user query terms higher than a document containing less number of user query terms. This makes perfect sense. Right?" This should have been changed in: "For the sake of this blog post I am interested in a simplified relevance concept: more query terms matched -> more relevance" In this way the blog would have not caused the outburst of (correct) indignation of the Information Retrieval community, that has been working for years on the topic, and knows very well how much complex is relevance.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]