Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Topic By Topic Performance of Information Retrieval Systems

Published

Author(s)

Walter S. Liggett Jr

Abstract

Formulation of topic properties is the goal of this paper. These properties are to be used in judging the difficulty of topics appropriate to the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) ad hoc task. Applying statistical methods to both TREC-6 and TREC-7 information retrieval results, we identify topic pairs that exemplify topic properties useful in relating topic statements to system performance. From two topics that seem the same with respect to the challenge they provide information retrieval systems, we formulate topic properties by relating the corresponsing topic statements to what is known about information retrieval systems. Some properties apparent in the topic pairs identified are linked to topicexpansion. These pairs exemplify both the need for expansion and the danger in automatic expansion.
Citation
Topic By Topic Performance of Information Retrieval Systems

Keywords

analysis of variance, information retreival, query expansion, statistical methods, system performance, topic statement

Citation

Liggett, W. (1999), Topic By Topic Performance of Information Retrieval Systems, Topic By Topic Performance of Information Retrieval Systems (Accessed April 26, 2024)
Created June 4, 1999, Updated February 17, 2017