Error analysis of difficult TREC topics
Xiao Hu, Sindhura Bandhakavi, ChengXiang Zhai · 2003
Given the experimental nature of information retrieval, progress critically depends on analyzing the errors made by existing retrieval approaches and understanding their limitations. Our research explores various hypothesized reasons for hard topics in TREC-8 ad hoc task, and shows that the bad performance is partially due to the existence of highly distracting sub-collections that can dominate the overall performance.