Shortest substring ranking (MultiText experiments for TREC-4)
Charles L. A. Clarke, Gordon V. Cormack, Forbes J. Burkowski · 1995
To address the TREC-4 topics, we used a precise query language that yields and combines arbitrary intervals of text rather than pre-defined units like words and documents. Each solution was scored in inverse proportion to the length of the shortest interval containing it. Each document was scored by the sum of the scores of solutions within it. Whenever the above strategy yielded less than 1000 documents, documents satisfying successively weaker queries were added with lower rank. Our results for the ad-hoc topics compare favourably with the median average precision for all groups. 1 Introduction The central concern of the MultiText project at the University of Waterloo is the management of data in large-scale distributed text database systems [10]. A major component of this work has been the development of a query language that is suitable for expressing queries over the heterogeneous data that is present in a very large text database. The query language developed for the MultiText p...