BM25Similarity: An Effective Relevance Model for Information Retrieval

Introduction

Everton Gomede, PhD
The Modern Scientist
4 min readJun 4, 2023

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In the world of information retrieval, one of the key challenges is to accurately assess the relevance of documents to a given query. BM25Similarity, also known as Best Matching 25, is a retrieval function that has emerged as a prominent method for calculating document relevance scores. BM25Similarity has gained significant attention due to its ability to handle the complexities of modern information retrieval systems. This essay explores the fundamentals, strengths, and applications of BM25Similarity.

Understanding BM25Similarity

BM25Similarity is based on the probabilistic retrieval framework, which assumes that documents and queries are generated based on a probabilistic model. It is designed to overcome the limitations of traditional retrieval models like the vector space model (VSM) and the TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) model. Unlike these models, BM25Similarity takes into account factors such as term frequency, document length, and collection statistics to calculate relevance scores.

Key Components and Calculation

BM25Similarity incorporates three primary components: term frequency, document length, and collection statistics. Term…

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Everton Gomede, PhD
The Modern Scientist

Postdoctoral Fellow Computer Scientist at the University of British Columbia creating innovative algorithms to distill complex data into actionable insights.