This paper presents our approach to retargeting the information retrieval systems designed and/or optimized for retrieval of MEDLINE citations to the task of finding relevant passages in the text of scientific articles. To continue using our TREC 2005 fusion approach, we needed a common representation for the full text biomedical articles to be shared by the four base systems (Essie, SMART, Eas...

In this paper, we report our experiments at NTCIR-10 SpokenDoc-2 task. We participated both the STD and SCR subtasks of SpokenDoc. For STD subtask, we applied novel indexing method, called metric subspace indexing, previously proposed by us. One of the distinctive advantages of the method was that it could output the detection results in increasing order of distance without using any predefined...

In this paper we discuss the enhancement of Arabic passage retrieval for both diacritisized and nondiacritisized text. Most previous work suggested that retrieval start with pre-processing the Arabic text to remove the diacritical marks (short vowels) to unify the text. In most cases, this process causes considerable ambiguity at the word level in the absence of context. However, searching for ...

The MultiText information retrieval system nds passages of text, as opposed to complete documents, that are likely relevant to a particular topic. Passage retrieval provides the basis for the relevance ranking, term expansion, interactive user interface, and distributed searching used in the MultiText experiments for TREC-6. The essence of relevance ranking is that shorter passages containing a...

In this paper, we document our efforts at INEX 2007 where we participated in the Ad Hoc Track, the Link the Wiki Track, and the Interactive Track that continued from INEX 2006. Our main aims at INEX 2007 were the following. For the Ad Hoc Track, we investigated the effectiveness of incorporating link evidence into the model, and of a CAS filtering method exploiting the structural hints in the I...

Document retrieval techniques have proven to be competitive methods in the evaluation of focused retrieval. Although focused approaches such as XML element retrieval and passage retrieval allow for locating the relevant text within a document, using the larger context of the whole document often leads to superior document level ranking. In this paper we investigate the impact of using the docum...

In our TREC-8 interactive experiment, we compared the effectiveness of a user-defined passage feedback system with a conventional document feedback system. The passage feedback system (pf) employed user-defined passages to formulate a feedback query, while the document feedback (df) system utilized document-level relevance judgments. The df system employed the adaptive linear model for retrieva...

Arabic is one of the languages which are less concerned by researchers in the field of Question Answering. The paper presents core modules of a new Arabic Question Answering system called IDRAAQ. These modules aim at enhancing the quality of retrieved passages with respect to a given question. Experiments have been conducted in the framework of the main task of QA4MRE@CLEF 2012 that includes th...

In the past two years in our participation in TREC, our efforts (Yang et al., 2002, 2003) have been focused on incorporating external knowledge for boosting document and passage retrieval performance in event-based open domain question answering (QA). Despite our previous successes, we have identified three weaknesses of our system with respect to this year’s task guidelines. First, our system ...

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is a classical technique to improve search engine retrieval effectiveness, by closing the vocabulary gap between users’ query formulations and relevant documents. While PRF typically applied on same target corpus as final retrieval, in past, external expansion techniques have sometimes been obtain high-quality pseudo-relevant set using . However, such approaches ...