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TF-IDF and BM25 shown to be exact KL divergences in new arXiv paper

By PulseAugur Editorial · [1 sources] ·

A new paper submitted to arXiv proposes that TF-IDF and BM25, two foundational methods for scoring query-document relevance, can be precisely interpreted as Kullback-Leibler divergences. This research establishes a unified probabilistic framework for these methods, offering a theoretical basis for comparison with other information retrieval techniques beyond experimental results. The paper specifically analyzes the BM25 variant commonly used in practice, which includes a plus-one correction in its IDF term. AI

RANK_REASON Academic paper published on arXiv detailing theoretical findings about information retrieval methods. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=0.4]

Read on arXiv cs.CL →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

TF-IDF and BM25 shown to be exact KL divergences in new arXiv paper

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Academic paper published on arXiv detailing theoretical findings about information retrieval methods. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=0.4]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Ivan Silajev ·

    TF-IDF and BM25 Are Exact KL Divergences

    arXiv:2609.14016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: TF-IDF and BM25 are two of the most widely used methods for scoring query-document relevance, yet neither has a standard probabilistic derivation that justifies it as a statistical method within a unified framework. We address thi…

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