Patent ID: 8538896

Claim:
A non-transitory storage medium storing instructions executable by a digital processor to perform a method comprising: optimizing weights of a document relevance scoring function to generate a trained document relevance scoring function ƒ(q,d) where q denotes a query and d denotes a document, wherein the document relevance scoring function comprises a weighted combination of scoring components including at least one pseudo-relevance scoring component and at least one cross-media relevance scoring component, and the optimizing is respective to a set of training documents including at least some multimedia training documents and a set of training queries and corresponding training document relevance annotations, the optimizing comprising optimizing a distribution-matchinq objective function respective to matching between: a distribution p q ⁡ ( d ) = exp ⁡ ( f ⁡ ( d , q ) ) ∑ d ′ ∈ D ⁢ exp ( f ⁡ ( d ′ , q ) of document relevance computed using the document relevance scoring function ƒ(q,d) for the set of training queries and the set of training documents D, and a distribution p q * ⁡ ( d ) = {  R q  - 1 : d ∈ R q 0 : d ∉ R q of the training document relevance annotations corresponding to the set of training queries where R q is the set of documents relevant to training query q; and performing a retrieval operation for an input query respective to a database using the trained document relevance scoring function to retrieve one or more documents from the database.