HARD Track Overview in TREC 2005 High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents

TREC 2005 saw the third year of the High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) track. The HARD track explores methods for improving the accuracy of document retrieval systems, with particular attention paid to the start of the ranked list. Although it has done so in a few different ways in the past, budget realities limited the track to “clarification forms” this year. The question investigated was whether highly focused interaction with the searcher be used to improve the accuracy of a system. Participants created “clarification forms” generated in response to a query—and leveraging any information available in the corpus—that were filled out by the searcher. Typical clarification questions might ask whether some titles seem relevant, whether some words or names are on topic, or whether a short passage of text is related.