smoothingScore

Returns the smoothing score of the current document matching the query. This score is used when the query/term does not appear in the document, and behaves like an idf. The smoothing score is particularly important when the Scorer returns a product of probabilities so that the document score does not go to zero when one probability is zero. This can return 0 or a smoothing score.

Smoothing scores are described in many papers, including: Metzler, D. and Croft, W. B. , "Combining the Language Model and Inference Network Approaches to Retrieval," Information Processing and Management Special Issue on Bayesian Networks and Information Retrieval, 40(5), pp.735-750.