Domain Specific Retrieval: Back to Basics

In this paper we will describe Berkeley’s approach to the Domain Specific (DS) track for CLEF 2006. This year we are not using the tools for thesaurus-based query expansion and de-compounding for German that were developed over the past many years and used very successfully in earlier Berkeley entries in this track. Our intent has been to incorporate those tools into the Cheshire system, but we were unable to complete the development in time for use in the officially submitted runs. This year Berkeley submitted 12 runs, including one for each subtask of the DS track. These include 3 Monolingual runs for English, German, and Russian, 7 Bilingual runs (3 X2EN, 1 X2DE, and 3 X2RU), and 2 Multilingual runs. For many DS sub-tasks our runs were the best performing runs, but sadly they were also the only runs for a number of subtasks. In the sub-tasks where there were other entries, our relative performance was above the mean performance in 2 sub-tasks and just below the mean in another.