TY - JOUR T1 - A Novel Approach Integrating Ranking Functions Discovery, Optimization and Inference to Improve Retrieval Performance AU - Febba, Ronald AU - K. Agbele, Kehinde AU - O. Nyongesa, Henry AU - O. Adesina, Ademola JO - International Journal of Soft Computing VL - 5 IS - 3 SP - 155 EP - 163 PY - 2010 DA - 2001/08/19 SN - 1816-9503 DO - ijscomp.2010.155.163 UR - https://makhillpublications.co/view-article.php?doi=ijscomp.2010.155.163 KW - Ranking function KW -information retrieval KW -evolutionary techniques KW -fuzzy inference system KW -data fusion method AB - The significant roles play by ranking function in the performance and success of Information Retrieval (IR) systems and search engines cannot be underestimated. Diverse ranking functions are available in IR literature. However, empirical studies show that ranking functions do not perform constantly well across different contexts (queries, collections, users). In this study, a novel three-stage integrated ranking framework is proposed for implementing discovering, optimizing and inference rankings used in IR systems. The first phase, discovery process is based on Genetic Programming (GP) approach which smartly combines structural and contents features in the documents while the second phase, optimization process is based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) which combines document retrieval scores of various well-known ranking functions. In the 3rd phase, Fuzzy inference proves as soft search constraints to be applied on documents. We demonstrate how these two features are combined to bring new tasks and processes within the three concept stages of integrated framework for effective IR. ER -