The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) participated in TREC 2006 Genomics Track. Our focus this year was to apply two language modeling techniques for information retrieval that have been proposed recently by our group [4, 1]. These two techniques have been shown to be effective for general English text. It is not clear, though, how they perform on text in special domains such as...

Pseudo-relevance feedback mechanisms, from Rocchio to the relevance models, have shown usefulness of expanding and reweighting users’ initial queries using information occurring in an set retrieved documents, known as pseudo-relevant set. Recently, dense retrieval – through use neural contextual language models such BERT for analysing documents’ queries’ contents computing their scores has a pr...

An olfactory stimulus and a visual stimulus were employed in a context-dependent memory study using a prose passage as the to-be-remembered item. Ninety-five university students (aged 17-35 years) learned the passage of prose in the presence of one of the stimuli and were then asked to recall the passage with the original context either reinstated or not reinstated. The results revealed a signi...

In 2012, the University of Hildesheim participated in the CLEF-IP claims-to-passage task. 4 runs were submitted and different approaches tested. The tested approaches included a language independent trigram search approach, one approach formulating a query in the source language only and another approach with querys translated to English, German, French and Spanish. The results were not satisfa...

. THIS STUDY WAS DESIGNED TO TEST THE HYPOTHESIS THAT ASSOCIATIVELY RELATED NOUNS EMBEDDED IN CONNECTED DISCOURSE--AT LEAST IN THE CASE OF ITEMS THAT APPEAR IN NE SAME OR IN CONTIGUOUS SENTENCES-ARE STORED MORE EFFICIENTLY THAN ASSOCIATIVELY UNRELATED NOUNS. A 2X2 FACTORIAL DESIGN WAS EMPLOYED (WITH 20 SS IN EACH GROUP) IN WHICH SS VERE ASKED TO MEMORIZE A PASSAGE THAT CONTAINED 14 GROUPS OF FO...

Motivation • As Salton et al. [1993, p.49] put it: Large collections of full-text documents are now commonly used in automated information retrieval. When the stored document texts are long, the retrieval of complete documents may not be in the users’ best interest. In such circumstances, efficient and effective retrieval results may be obtained by using passage retrieval strategies designed to...

This paper presents a hybrid case-based reasoning (CBR) and information retrieval (IR) system, called SPIRE, that both retrieves documents from a full-text document corpus and from within individual documents, and locates passages likely to contain information about important problem-solving features of cases. SPIRE uses two case-bases, one containing past precedents, and one containing excerpt...

We describe DCU’s participation in the NTCIR-11 SpokenQuery&Document task. We participated in the spokenquery spoken content retrieval (SQ-SCR) subtask by using the slide group segments as basic indexing and retrieval units. Our approach integrates normalised prosodic features into a standard BM25 weighting function to increase weights for terms that are prominent in speech. Text queries and re...

In our rst participation in TREC, our focus was on improving the basic ranking systems and applying text clustering techniques for query expansion. We tested a variety of techiniques including reference measures, passage retrieval, and data fusion for the basic ranking systems. Some techiniques were used in the o cial run, others were not used because of time limitations. We applied the text cl...

Prior Art Search is an information seeking task where searchers, for instance patent examiners, search for published literature to determine whether the claimed invention in a patent application is novel. In Prior Art Search, search tasks are often timesensitive and consist of rich information needs with multiple aspects/subtopics. In this thesis, we explore information retrieval techniques and...