Pitt at TREC 2005: HARD and Enterprise
Daqing He, Jae‐wook Ahn · Text REtrieval Conference · 2005
The University of Pittsburgh team participated in two tracks for TREC 2005: the High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) track and the Enterprise Retrieval track. The goal of Pitt’s HARD study in TREC 2005 was to examine the effectiveness of applying Self Organizing Maps (SOM) as a visual presentation tool and as a clustering tool in the context of HARD tasks, especially its role in clarification form generation. Our experiment results demonstrate that SOM can be used as a clustering tool to generate terms for query expansion based on interactive relevance feedback. It produced significant improvement over the baseline when measured by R-Prec. However, its effectiveness of being a visualization tool for users to make relevance feedback still needs careful examination and further studies. Our goal in this year’s enterprise search track was to study the effect of query expansion based on an expansion corpus in retrieving emails from an email corpus. The expansion corpus consisted of the WWW, People and ESW sub-collections of the W3C test collection. The results indicate that query expansion based on the expansion corpus can achieve significant improvement over the no expansion baselines. However, there is no significant difference to the simpler query expansion approach using blind relevance feedback. Interestingly the terms used in these two query expansion approaches are different, with averagely only 6 term overlap among 20 possible terms. Further study is needed for examining the effect of combining these two approaches.