Response to “Predictable difficulty or difficulty to predict”

Using a Medical Thesaurus to Predict Query Difficulty

Estimating query performance is the task of predicting the quality of results returned by a search engine in response to a query. In this paper, we focus on pre-retrieval prediction methods for the medical domain. We propose a novel predictor that exploits a thesaurus to ascertain how difficult queries are. In our experiments, we show that our predictor outperforms the state-of-the-art methods ...

Using Coherence-Based Measures to Predict Query Difficulty

We investigate the potential of coherence-based scores to predict query difficulty. The coherence of a document set associated with each query word is used to capture the quality of a query topic aspect. A simple query coherence score, QC-1, is proposed that requires the average coherence contribution of individual query terms to be high. Two further query scores, QC-2 and QC-3, are developed b...

Stomach: Position of, as Guide to Pyloric or Duodenal Difficulty

The difficulty of coercion: a response to de Almeida.

The sentence The secretary began the memo requires specifying what event the secretary began, because the memo does not refer to an event. McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, and Jackendoff (2001) and Traxler, Pickering, and McElree (2002) found evidence from both self-paced reading and eye-tracking that such sentences caused processing difficulty, and thus argued that people "coerced" the obje...

Aspiration due to difficulty in swallowing.