  Automatic language processing tools typically assign to terms so-called
weights corresponding to the contribution of terms to information content.
Traditionally, term weights are computed from lexical statistics, e.g., term
frequencies. We propose a new type of term weight that is computed from part of
speech (POS) n-gram statistics. The proposed POS-based term weight represents
how informative a term is in general, based on the POS contexts in which it
generally occurs in language. We suggest five different computations of
POS-based term weights by extending existing statistical approximations of term
information measures. We apply these POS-based term weights to information
retrieval, by integrating them into the model that matches documents to
queries. Experiments with two TREC collections and 300 queries, using TF-IDF &
BM25 as baselines, show that integrating our POS-based term weights to
retrieval always leads to gains (up to +33.7% from the baseline). Additional
experiments with a different retrieval model as baseline (Language Model with
Dirichlet priors smoothing) and our best performing POS-based term weight, show
retrieval gains always and consistently across the whole smoothing range of the
baseline.
