BM25 Probabilistic Ranking (Okapi)

BM25, the Okapi 'Best Matching 25' function, is the dominant classical ranking function in information retrieval and the workhorse term-weighting scheme behind most lexical search engines and bibliographic databases. Developed by Stephen Robertson, Karen Spärck Jones and colleagues at City University London and formalized in Robertson and Zaragoza's 2009 monograph on the Probabilistic Relevance Framework, BM25 scores a document against a query as a sum, over query terms, of inverse-document-frequency weights multiplied by a saturating, length-normalized transform of within-document term frequency. Two free parameters control how quickly repeated terms stop adding evidence (k1) and how strongly document length is penalized (b). BM25 consistently outperformed plain TF-IDF in the TREC evaluations and remains the standard first-stage retrieval baseline against which modern neural rankers are measured.