Text REtrieval Conference 

About: Text REtrieval Conference is an academic conference. The conference publishes majorly in the area(s): Query expansion & Relevance (information retrieval). Over the lifetime, 2165 publications have been published by the conference receiving 54375 citations.

Okapi at TREC

Abstract: City submitted two runs each for the automatic ad hoc, very large collection track, automatic routing and Chinese track; and took part in the interactive and filtering tracks. The method used was : expansion using terms from the top documents retrieved by a pilot search on topic terms. Additional runs seem to show that we would have done better without expansion. Twor runs using the method of city96al were also submitted for the Very Large Collection track. The training database and its relevant documents were partitioned into three parts. Working on a pool of terms extracted from the relevant documents for one partition, an iterative procedure added or removed terms and/or varied their weights. After each change in query content or term weights a score was calculated by using the current query to search a second protion of the training database and evaluating the results against the corresponding set of relevant documents. Methods were compared by evaluating queries predictively against the third training partition. Queries from different methods were then merged and the results evaluated in the same way. Two runs were submitted, one based on character searching and the other on words or phrases. Much of the work involved investigating plausible methods of applying Okapi-style weighting to phrases

Combination of multiple searches

Abstract: The TREC-2 project at Virginai Tech focused on methods for combining the evidence from multiple retrieval runs to improve performance over any single retrieval method. This paper describes one such method that has been shown to increase performance by combining the similarity values from five different retrieval runs using both vector space and P-norm extended boolean retrieval methods

Automatic Query expansion using SMART : TREC 3

Abstract: The Smart information retrieval project emphasizes completely automatic approaches to the understanding and retrieval of large quantities of text. We continue our work in TREC 3, performing runs in the routing, ad-hoc, and foreign language environments. Our major focus is massive query expansion : adding from 300 to 530 terms to each query. These terms come from known relevant documents in the case of routing, and from just the top retrieved documents in the case of ad-hoc and Spanish. This approach improves effectiveness from 7% to 25% in the various experiments. Other ad-hoc work extends our investigations into combining global similarities, giving an overall indication of how a document matches a query, with local similarities identifying a smaller part of the document which matches the query. Using an overlapping text window definition of local, we achieve a 16% improvement.

Overview of TREC 2004

Abstract: TREC 2004 marks the third and nal year for the novelty track. The task is as follows: Given a TREC topic and an ordered list of documents, systems must nd the relevant and novel sentences that should be returned to the user from this set. This task integrates aspects of passage retrieval and information ltering. As in 2003, there were two categories of topics { events and opinions { and four subtasks which provided systems with varying amounts of relevance or novelty information as training data. This year, the task was made harder by the inclusion of some number of irrelevant documents in document sets. Fourteen groups participated in the track this year.