Boolean Operators in Interactive Search.
Julio Villena-Román, Raquel M. Crespo García, José Carlos González Cristóbal · CLEF (Working Notes) · 2005
This paper presents the participation of the MIRACLE team at the ImageCLEF interactive search task. Basically, queries consisting on several terms can be processed combining their words using either an AND function or an OR function. The AND approach forces the user to use precise vocabulary and query terms must exactly match the terms in the index for the target to be found. However, this is quite difficult to integrate in cross-lingual systems with automatic translation, as many terms can turn out to be ambiguous and accept different translation options. The OR approach allows less precise vocabulary and more ambiguous translations, and also relevance feedback can be used to achieve the search goals. From the user’s point of view, the AND approach seems to be more intuitive because the system responses can be made as precise as wanted, simply by adding more words to the query. On the other hand, with the OR approach, the more terms are included in the query, the more images are probably recovered. In a cross language scenario, the AND approach can prove to be difficult for non-native speakers, particularly in specialised tasks which require domain-specific vocabulary as the one modelled in our experiment. In such conditions, the OR approach assisted by automatic translation can be a more helpful choice. Our idea is to compare if the search success rate is similar for both approaches.