This paper describes several approaches which we used for the expert search task of the TREC 2007 Enterprise track. We studied several methods of relevance propagation from documents to related candidate experts. Instead of onestep propagation from documents to directly related candidates, used by many systems in the previous years, we do not limit the relevance flow and disseminate it further ...

Humans can e ectively navigate through large search spaces, enabling them to solve problems with daunting complexity. This is largely due to an ability to successfully distinguish between relevant and irrelevant actions (moves). In this paper we present a new single-agent search pruning technique that is based on a move's in uence. The in uence measure is a crude form of relevance in that it is...

This paper describes experiments carried out with the XFIRM system in the INEX 2006 framework. The XFIRM system uses a relevance propagation method to answer CO and CO+S queries. Runs were submitted to the ad-hoc, relevance feedback and multimedia tracks.

A maximum likelihood approach to relevance feedback is introduced. This approach has the additional benefit of resolving document-query duality. The main idea is that in order to know whether and how much to modify a document and/or query in response to relevance feedback data, we need to have error models for documents, queries, and relevance feedback data. A maximum likelihood approach can th...

A large body of work in the information retrieval area has highlighted that relevance is a complex and a challenging concept. The underlying complexity appears mainly from the fact that relevance is estimated by considering multiple dimensions and that most of them are subjective since they are user-dependent. While the most used dimension is topicality, recent works risen particularly from per...

Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) assumes that the topranking n documents of the initial retrieval are relevant and extracts expansion terms from them. In this work, we introduce the notion of pseudo-irrelevant documents, i.e. high-scoring documents outside of top n that are highly unlikely to be relevant. We show how pseudo-irrelevant documents can be used to extract better expansion terms from ...

We analyze the results of several experimental runs submitted for the TREC 2008 Legal Track. In the Ad Hoc task, we found that rank-based merging of vector results with the reference Boolean results produced a statistically significant increase in mean F1@K and Recall@B compared to just using the reference Boolean results. In the Relevance Feedback task, we found that the investigated relevance...

This paper describes experiments carried out with the XFIRM system in the INEX 2005 framework. The XFIRM system uses a relevance propagation method to answer CO and CAS queries. Runs were submitted to the ad-hoc and relevance feedback tracks.

Programming an audio synthesizer can be a difficult task for many. However, if a user has a general idea of the sound they are trying to program, they may be able to imitate it with their voice. This paper presents SynthAssist, a system for interactively searching the synthesis space of an audio synthesizer. In this work, we present how to use the system for querying a database of audio synthes...

This paper presents a new relevance feedback technique; selectively combining evidence based on the usage of terms within documents. By considering how terms are used within documents, we can better describe the features that might make a document relevant and thus improve retrieval effectiveness. In this paper we present an initial, experimental investigation of this technique, incorporating n...