Question

I am trying to implement BM25f scoring system on Lucene. I need to make a few minor changes to the original implementation given here for my needs, I got lost at the part where he gets Average Field Length and document length… Could someone guide me as to how or where I get it from?

Answer 1

You can get field length from TermVector instances associated with documents’ fields, but that will increase your index size. This is probably the way to go unless you cannot afford a larger index. Of course you will still need to calculate the average yourself, and store it elsewhere (or perhaps in a special document with a well-known external id that you just update when the statistics change).

If you can store the data outside of the index, one thing you can do is count the tokens when documents are tokenized, and store the counts for averaging. If your document collection is static, just dump the values for each field into a file & process after indexing. If the index needs to get updated with additions only, you can store the number of documents and the average length per field, and recompute the average. If documents are going to be removed, and you need an accurate count, you will need to re-parse the document being removed to know how many terms each field contained, or get the length from the TermVector if you are using that.