Berkeley2 at GeoCLEF: Cross-Language Geographic Information Retrieval of German and English Documents.
Vivien Petras, Fredric C. Gey · CLEF (Working Notes) · 2005
Berkeley group 2 participated in the GeoCLEF pilot track of CLEF 2005 by performing English and German monolingual geographic information retrieval and bilingual geographic information retrieval using English topics to retrieve German documents and vice versa. Our results were substantially above the medians for all categories. We found that major improvements for German retrieval derived from successful blind feedback (between 53 and 72 percent improvement in MAP depending upon the run type) rather than decompounding of German compound words. Manual expansion of geographic references (e.g. Europe to individual country names) was disastrous to retrieval performance. Clearly, successful geographic information retrieval will require substantially more research to improve upon heuristic approaches.