The effect of indexing exhaustivity on retrieval performance

摘要

The effect of variations in indexing exhaustivity on retrieval performance in a vector space retrieval system was investigated by using a term weight threshold to construct different document representations for a test collection. Retrieval results showed that retrieval performance, as measured by the mean optimal E measure for all queries at a term weight threshold, was highest at the most exhaustive representation, and decreased slightly as terms were eliminated and the indexing representation became less exhaustive. These findings, coupled with those of Shaw for a retrieval system based on single-link clustering, suggest that the vector space model is more robust against variations in indexing exhaustivity than is the single-link clustering model.