ANU/ACSys TREC-5 Experiments

A number of experiments conducted within the framework of the TREC-5 conference and using the Parallel Document Retrieval Engine (PADRE) are reported. Several of the experiments involve the use of distance-based relevance scoring (spans). This scoring method is shown to be capable of very good precision-recall performance, provided that good queries can be generated. Semi-automatic methods for rening manually-generated span queries are described and evaluated in the context of the adhoc retrieval task. Span queries are also applied to processing a larger (4.5 gigabyte) collection, to retrieval over OCR-corrupted data and to a database merging task. Lightweight probe queries are shown to be an eective method for identifying promising information servers in the context of the latter task. New techniques for automatically generating more conventional weighted-term queries from short topic descriptions have also been devised and are evaluated.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: TREC
• Authors: David Hawking, Paul B. Thistlewaite, Peter Bailey
• Keywords: Adhoc Retrieval Task, Manually-generated Span Queries, Span Queries, TREC 1996, TREC 2008