Siemens TREC-4 report : Further experiments with database merging
Ellen M. Voorhees · 1995
A database merging technique is a strategy for combining the results of multiple, independent searches into a single cohesive response. An isolated database merging technique selects the number of documents to be retrieved from each database without using data from the component databases at run-time. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of two isolated database merging techniques in the context of the TREC-4 database merging task. The results show that on average a merged result contains about 1 fewer relevant document per query than a comparable single collection run when retrieving up to 100 documents. 1 Introduction Siemens has used TREC-4 to continue its investigation of the collection fusion or database merging problem. Informally, the database merging problem is to combine the retrieval results from multiple, independent databases into a single result that has the best possible effectiveness. Such a search is necessary in a variety of distributed IR settings, with th...