Tarragon Consulting Corporation participated in the adhoc retrieval task of the TREC 2004 Genomics Track. We used a standard deployment of the K2 search engine from Verity, Inc. in which we exploited the free-text query parser to interpret the information need statements provided in the task. The primary goal of our participation was to establish a performance baseline using "of-the-shelf" tools and then to explore how knowledge-based extensions could enhance performance. Time and resource constraints prevented us from performing the knowledge-based experiments, but our official submissions show that reasonable performance can be achieved using just our baseline strategy. Overall Approach In our approach, we emphasize the use of "off-theshelf" tools to provide a baseline capability and then explore ways in which custom algorithms and technologies can be used to enhance performance. For the TREC 2004 Genomics AdHoc Retrieval Task, we used Verity's K2 search eng...
Richard M. Tong