UMass at TREC ciQA 2006

The characteristics of the ciQA Track namely the short templated queries and the scope for user interaction were the motivating factors for our interest in participating in the track. Templated queries represent a new paradigm of information-seeking more suited for specialized tasks. While work has been done in document retrieval for templated queries as part of the Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program, the retrieval of snippets of information in lieu of documents was an interesting challenge. We also utilized the opportunity to try a suite of minimally interactive techniques, some of which helped and some did not. We believe we have a reasonable understanding of why some approaches worked while other failed, and contend that more experimentation and analysis is necessary to tease out various interaction effects between the suite of approaches we tried.