1 Introduction The goal of our work in the HARD track was to test techniques for using knowledge about various aspects of the information seeker's context to improve IR system performance. We were particularly concerned with such knowledge which could be gained through implicit sources of evidence, rather than explicit questioning of the information seeker. We therefore did not submit any clari...

An interactive track was included in INEX for the first time this year, at INEX 2004. The main aim of the track was to study the behaviour of searchers when interacting with components of XML documents. In this paper, we describe the motivation and aims of the track in detail, we outline the methodology and we present some initial findings from the analysis of the results. 1. INTERACTIVE TRACK ...

The experiments presented in this paper explore topics surrounding video information retrieval (IR). This paper will discuss in detail our participation at TRECVID 2004. A video retrieval system named ViewFinder was developed to search and browse the TRECVID 2004 test data, and both manual and interactive search experiments were carried out. Each of the performed search experiments were in agre...

Yiming Lu, Jian Hu, Fanyuan Ma ( Department of Computer Science & Engineering , S hanghai Jiaotong University , S hanghai 200030) {luyiniao , hujian , ma-fy}@sjtu.edu.cn Abstract: This is the first year our lab to participate in Trec. We participate in Mixed-Query task for the Web track. All the runs we submitted are based on the modified Okapi weighting scheme. Besides, we used several heurist...

Our participation in TREC 2004 aims to extend and improve the use of the DFR (Divergence From Randomness) models with Query Expansion (QE) for the robust track. We experiment with a new parameter-free version of Rocchio’s Query Expansion and use the information theory based function, InfoDFR to predict the AP (Average Precision) of queries. We also study how the use of an external collection af...

We describe our participation in the TREC 2004 Web, Terabyte, and Question Answering tracks. We provide a detailed account of the ideas underlying our approaches to these tasks, report on our results, and give a summary of our findings so far.

Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) participated in TREC-2004, submitting 18 runs. We focus on studying the problem of the combination of the userand query-information from clarification forms and metadata. We provided two kinds of Clarification Form. Our experiment shows the CF2 is more effective than CF1. We use Google as a resource for query expansion base on metadata ...

We describe the official runs of our team for the CLEF 2004 ad hoc tasks. We took part in the monolingual task (for Finnish, French, Portuguese, and Russian), in the bilingual task (for Amharic to English, and English to Portuguese), and, finally, in the multilingual task.

For the TREC 2004 Novelty track, UMass participated in all four tasks. Although finding relevant sentences was harder this year than last, we continue to show marked improvements over the baseline of calling all sentences relevant, with a variant of tfidf being the most successful approach. We achieve 5–9% improvements over the baseline in locating novel sentences, primarily by looking at the s...

It is the second time that the Chinese Information Processing group of NLPR participates in TREC. In the past, we have investigated the use of two key technologies: Window-based weighting method and Semantic Tree Model for query expansion, with success, to tasks in novelty and robust tracks. We focused on the Robust Retrieval Track at this year’s conference. Based on the previous IR architectur...