A re-unification of two competing models for document retrieval

Two competing approaches for document retrieval were first identified by Robertson, Maron, & Cooper (1982) for probabilistic retrieval. The difficulty of unifying those approaches was introduced as a problem of resolving query-focused with document-focused retrieval, and an approach towards unification was offered. That approach rests on a re-conceptualization of the meaning of term weight estimates. In this work, we propose a new unified model. The unification problem is re-framed as resulting from a lack of theory regarding the relationship of two sorts of data, absolute and relative. This new unified model is valid even for traditional interpretations of term estimates.