Scaled structure in visualized TREC data and query feedback

摘要

A specific hypothesis arising from an earlier exploratory study (Rorvig & Fitzpatrick, 1998) was tested in this experiment. The data confirm that in the use of the query feedback technique in retrieval, query surrogate documents chosen from within dense inter-document structures appearing in scaled and visualized TREC Topic-document datasets raise the number of relevant documents subsequently retrieved by 26–46%, depending on the method of calculation. Use of documents as query surrogates which were chosen from the periphery of such dense inter-document structures did not differ significantly from the results retrieved by use of the topic specification document itself, submitted as a query. Some anomalies appear in one of the datasets from which a specific pattern is suggested for further exploration. Retrieval performance of IR systems on datasets for which relevant documents are located primarily outside dense inter-document structures was predicted to be poor in Rorvig and Fitzpatrick. This prediction was confirmed. It is suggested that some aspects of these findings may be incorporated into commercial IR systems.