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An alternative use of RelFbk is to make changes to the documents
rather than to the query. While before the argument was that it is
sensible to make the query look more like those documents the users
liked, the argument now is the converse: Documents found relevant to a
query should be described more like the query used to identify them.
Changes made to document vectors according to this heuristic are known
as DOCUMENT MODIFICATIONS and shown in Figure (figure) .
Note
that unlike query modification, adaptive document modifications made in
response to RelFbk are not expected to be of (immediate) use to the
users who provide them. Instead, the hope is that these changed
documents' representations are available later, to others who might be
searching. As Salton [Salton83]
describes the goal: Following a large number of such interactions
documents which are wanted by the users will have been moved slowly into
the active portion of the document space - that part in which large
numbers of users' queries are concentrated, while items which are
normally rejected will be located on the periphery of the space. [p.
145] This provocative proposal, {\em allowing a search engine to learn
from its users}, is considered in much greater detail in Chapter §7 .
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Using \RelFbk to adapt documents' indices