The Effect of Query Characteristics on Retrieval Results in the TREC Retrieval Tests

Authors

  • Michael J. Nelson University of Western Ontario

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29173/cais413

Abstract

There have been three Text Retrieval Conferences (TREC) organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) over the last three years which have compared retrieval results on fairly large databases (at least 1 gigabyte). The queries (called topics), relevance judgements and databases were all provided by NIST. The main goal of the tests was to compare various retrieval algorithms using various measures of retrieval effectiveness. When Tague-Sutcliffe (in press) performed an analysis of variance on the average precision there is a large group of systems at the top of the ranking which are not significantly different. In addition the queries contribute more to the mean square than the systems. To gather further insight into the results, this research investigates the variation in query properties as a partial explanation for the variation in retrieval scores. For each topic statement for the queries, the length (number of content words), length of various parts and total number of relevant documents are correlated with the average precision.

Author Biography

Michael J. Nelson, University of Western Ontario

Graduate School of Library and Information Science

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Published

2013-11-02

How to Cite

Nelson, M. J. (2013). The Effect of Query Characteristics on Retrieval Results in the TREC Retrieval Tests. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS Actes Du congrès Annuel De l’ACSI. https://doi.org/10.29173/cais413

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Section

Articles