Combining Evidence for Information Retrieval.
Nicholas J. Belkin, Paul B. Kantor, Colleen Cool, Richard Quatrain · 1993
This study investigated the effect on retrieval performance of two methods of combination of multiple representations of TREC topics. Five separate Boolean queries for each of the 50 TREC routing topics and 25 of the TREC ad hoc topics were generated by 75 experienced online searchers. Using the INQUERY retrieval system, these queries were both combined into single queries, and used to produce five separate retrieval results, for each topic. In the former case, results indicate that progressive combination of queries leads to progressively improving retrieval performance, significantly better than that of single queries, and at least as good as the best individual single query formulations. In the latter case, data fusion of the ranked lists also led to performance better than that of any single list. 1.