Research on optimizing the merging results of multiple independent retrieval systems by a discrete particle swarm optimization

The result merging for multiple Independent Resource Retrieval Systems (IRRSs), which is a key component in developing a meta-search engine, is a difficult problem that still not effectively solved. Most of the existing result merging methods, usually suffered a great influence from the usefulness weight of different IRRS results and overlap rate among them. In this paper, we proposed a scheme that being capable of coalescing and optimizing a group of existing multi-sources-retrieval merging results effectively by Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO). The experimental results show that the DPSO, not only can overall outperform all the other result merging algorithms it employed, but also has better adaptability in application for unnecessarily taking into account different IRRS’s usefulness weight and their overlap rate with respect to a concrete query. Compared to other result merging algorithms it employed, the DPSO’s recognition precision can increase nearly 24.6%, while the precision standard deviation for different queries can decrease about 68.3%.