University of Surrey Participation in TREC8: Weirdness Indexing for Logical Document Extrapolation and Retrieval (WILDER).
Khurshid Ahmad, Lee Gillam, Lena Tostevin · 1999
This paper describes the development of a prototype document retrieval system based on frequency calculations and corpora comparison techniques. The prototype, WILDER, generated simple frequency information based on which calculations of document relevance could be made. The prototype was built to allow the University of Surrey to debut in the U.S. Text Retrieval Competition (TREC). User queries as specified by the TREC organisers were converted into simple word-frequency lists and compared against values for the entire corpus. These relative frequency values indicatively produced document relevance. The application of morphological and empirical heuristics enabled WILDER to produce the ranked frequency lists required. Introduction The ad hoc task of TREC8 investigates the performance of systems in ranking a static set of documents against novel topics (queries). For each topic, the top 1000 documents satisfying the topic are submitted. Recall and precision techniques are used on the...