Interactive Substring Retrieval (MultiText Experiments for TREC-5).
Charles L. A. Clarke, Gordon V. Cormack · 1996
Queries for TREC-5 were formulated in the GCL query language using an interactive system that showed short passages containing relevant terms. Solutions to the queries were ranked by the shortest substring method introduced at TREC-4, resulting in good precision/recall performance in the adhoc and routing tasks. Performance results were found to be insensitive to a document length normalization adjustment. Shortest substring ranking was augmented by the use of a progression of successively weaker queries to improve recall, but this augmentation provided only a slight improvement to overall retrieval effectiveness. 1 Introduction For TREC-5, the MultiText Project focused on the development of interaction methods for query creation and refinement using a ranking technique introduced at TREC-4. In the MultiText system, ranking is based entirely on term proximity, with queries expressed in a boolean subset of the general structured text retrieval language GCL [3, 4, 5]. In the GCL query l...