This report describes the participation at the Web track of the TREC-(Italy). TREC-9 has been our rst participation to TREC and, then, to the Web track. In the following, we describe the experimental approach we have chosen, the research hypotheses and questions, the problems we encountered, the results we reached and our conclusions. We consider this experience as the rst step towards the part...

Question Answering (QA) is an emerging important field in Information Retrieval. In a QA system the archive of previous questions asked from the system makes a collection full of useful factual nuggets. This paper makes an initial attempt to investigate the reuse of facts contained in the archive of previous questions to help and gain performance in answering future related factoid questions. I...

Passage retrieval and pseudo relevance feedback/query expansion have been reported as two effective means for improving document retrieval in literature. Relevance models, while improving retrieval in most cases, hurts performance on some heterogeneous collections. Previous research has shown that combining passage-level evidence with pseudo relevance feedback brings added benefits. In this pap...

Our Genomics experiments mainly focus on addressing four problems in biomedical information retrieval. The four problems are: (1) how to deal with synonyms? (2) how to deal with the frequent use of acronyms? (3) how to deal with homonyms? (4) how to deal with the document-level retrieval, passagelevel retrieval and aspect-level retrieval? In particular, we use the automatic query expansion algo...

Information retrieval researchers have studied passage retrieval extensively, yet there is no consensus within the community about how to evaluate the results of passage retrieval experiments. This paper describes five character-level passage evaluation measures and tasks for which they may be appropriate. In the second half of the paper we compare several passage retrieval models, including a ...

At INEX there is an underlying assumption that XML-retrieval and element retrieval are one and the same. This is, in fact, not the case. The hypothesis at INEX is that XML markup is useful for information retrieval. We firmly believe this, but no longer in element retrieval. In this contribution we examine in detail the evidence collected in support of element retrieval and suggest that, contra...

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...

Element and passage retrieval systems are able to extract and rank parts of documents and return them to the user rather than the whole document. Element retrieval is used to search XML documents and identify relevant XML elements, while passage retrieval is used to identify relevant passages. This paper reports a series of experiments on element retrieval, using a general passage retrieval alg...

Machine translation (MT) techniques can be used to generate a query in a target language from a query in a source language for the cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). Recent MT systems have advanced enough to generate translations which are human-readable, However, translation error is still a serious impediment which hurts the effectiveness of a CLIR system. To compensate for defects ...