Assessing the term independence assumption in blind relevance feedback Jimmy Lin and G. Craig Murray   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Posters Abstract When applying blind relevance feedback for ad hoc document retrieval, is it possible to identify, a priori, the set of query terms that will most improve retrieval performance? Can this complex problem be reduced into the simpler one of making independent decisions about the performance effects of each query term? Our experiments suggest that, for the selection of terms for blind relevance feedback, the term independence assumption may be empirically justified. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery