There are two major shortcomings of the Boolean Retrieval Model that has attracted many researchers to improve the model since 1980s. These two problems are: inability to accommodate term weight in boolean queries and being unable to rank in Boolean Retrieval Model. Approaches to improve these two disadvantages can help us to achieve better precision and recall results for information retrieval...

The Smart information retrieval project was started in 1961. During the past 30 years methods have been developed for the automatic term assignment to natural-language texts (automatic indexing), automatic document clustering, collection searching, and the automatic reformulation of search queries using relevance feedback. Many of these procedures have been incorporated into prac tical retrieva...

BACKGROUND The process of constructing a systematic review, a document that compiles the published evidence pertaining to a specified medical topic, is intensely time-consuming, often taking a team of researchers over a year, with the identification of relevant published research comprising a substantial portion of the effort. The standard paradigm for this information-seeking task is to use Bo...

We describe an experiment to compare the effectiveness of Boolean retrieval and weighted retrieval on a commercial data collection that contains millions of documents. The experiment was carried out via a front-end connected to an operational conventional host-oriented IR environment. In contrast to previous experiments where weighted retrieval had to be simulated on the host, our host was equi...

This paper is concerned with systematically exploring and evaluating a range of possible boolean retrieval strategies for use within a Question Answering (QA) system. We firstly set out two evaluation metrics — coverage and recall — which are specifically designed for use in evaluating retrieval performance in a QA context, and apply these measure in quantifying the performance of some standard...

Extended Boolean retrieval (EBR) models were proposed nearly three decades ago, but have had little practical impact, despite their significant advantages compared to either ranked keyword or pure Boolean retrieval. In particular, EBR models produce meaningful rankings; their query model allows the representation of complex concepts in an and–or format; and they are scrutable, in that the score...

In this paper, we document our efforts in participating to the TREC 2007 Legal track. We had multiple aims: First, to experiment with using different query formulations, trying to exploit the verbose topic statements. Second, to analyse how ranked retrieval methods can be fruitfully combined with traditional Boolean queries. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: First, we got mixed re...