Applying the Annotation View on Messages for Discussion Search

In this paper we present our runs for the TREC 2005 Enterprise Track discussion search task. Our approaches are based on the view of replies as annotations of the previous message. Quotations in particular play an important role, since they indicate the target of such an annotation. We examine the role of quotations as a context for the unquoted parts as well as the role of quotations as an indicator of which parts of a message were seen as important enough to react to. Results show that retrieval effectiveness w.r.t. the topicality of email messages can be improved by applying this annotation view on email messages.