Nj. Belkin et al., COMBINING THE EVIDENCE OF MULTIPLE QUERY REPRESENTATIONS FOR INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL, Information processing & management, 31(3), 1995, pp. 431-448
Citations number
22
Categorie Soggetti
Information Science & Library Science","Information Science & Library Science","Computer Science Information Systems
We report on two studies in the TREC-2 program that investigated the e
ffect on retrieval performance of combination of multiple representati
ons of TREC topics. In one of the projects, five separate Boolean quer
ies for each of the 50 TREC routing topics and 25 of the TREC ad hoc t
opics were generated by 75 experienced online searchers, Using the INQ
UERY retrieval system, these queries were both combined into single qu
eries, and used to produce five separate retrieval results for each to
pic. In the former case, progressive combination of queries led to pro
gressively improving retrieval performance, significantly better than
that of single queries, and at least as good as the best individual si
ngle-query formulations. In the latter case, data fusion of the ranked
lists also led to performance better than that of any single list. In
the second project, two automatically produced vector queries and thr
ee versions of a manually produced P-norm extended Boolean query for e
ach routing and ad hoc topic were compared and combined. This project
investigated six different methods of combination of queries, and the
combination of the same queries on different databases. As in the firs
t project, progressive combination led to progressively improving resu
lts, with the best results, on average, being achieved by combination
through summing of retrieval status values. Both projects found that t
he best method of combination often led to results that were better th
an the best performing single query. The combined results from the two
projects have also been combined by data fusion. The results of this
procedure show that combining evidence from completely different syste
ms also leads to performance improvement.