estimators used for the multinomial query model in ad-hoc Language Models (including
Laplace and Bayes-smoothing) are approximations to the Bayesian predictive distribution. In
this paper we derive the full predictive distribution in a form amenable to implementation by
classical IR models, and then compare it to other currently used estimators. In our
experiments the proposed model outperforms Bayes-smoothing, and its combination with …