University of North Carolina's HARD Track Experiments at TREC 2004

In the experiment described in this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of a document-independent technique for eliciting additional information from searchers about their information problems. We propose that such a technique can be used to elicit terms for use in query expansion and as a follow-up when ambiguous queries are initially posed by searchers. We use a clarification form to obtain additional information from searchers and create a series of experimental runs based on the information that we obtained from this form. Although we were successful at eliciting more information from searchers, we were unable to demonstrate that this additional information increased performance because of an indexing error that resulted in very poor performance for our baseline and experimental runs. Additionally, we use our clarification form to investigate an alternative measure of topic familiarity and demonstrate how it relates to the length of searchers' topic descriptions and respo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: TREC
• Authors: Diane Kelly, Vijay Deepak Dollu, Xin Fu
• Keywords: Additional Information, Clarification Form, Searchers, TREC 2004, TREC 2008