Abstract

The retrieval of similar documents in the Web from a given document is different in many aspects from information retrieval based on queries generated by regular search engine users. In this work, a new method is proposed for Web similarity document retrieval based on generative language models and meta search engines. Probabilistic language models are used as a random query generator for the given document. Queries are submitted to a customizable set of Web search engines. Once all results obtained are gathered, its evaluation is determined by a proposed scoring function based on the Zipf law. Results obtained showed that the proposed methodology for query generation and scoring procedure solves the problem with acceptable levels of precision. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.