CWI at TREC 2011: Session, Web, and Medical

Jiyin He, Vera Hollink, Corrado Boscarino, Arjen P. de Vries, Roberto Cornacchia
2011 Text Retrieval Conference  
We report on the participation of the Interactive Information Access group of the CWI Amsterdam in the web, session, and medical track at TREC 2011. In the web track we focus on the diversity task. We find that cluster-based subtopic modeling approaches improve diversification performance compared to a non-cluster-based subtopic modeling approach. While gain was observed on previous years' topic sets, diversification with the proposed approaches hurt the performance when compared to a
more » ... ified baseline run on this year's topic set. In the session track, we examine the effects of differentiating between 'good' and 'bad' users. We find that differentiation is useful as the use of search history appears to be mainly effective when the search is not going well. However, our current strategy is not effective for 'good' users. In addition, we studied the use of random walks on query graphs for formulating session history as search queries, but results are inconclusive. In the medical track, we found that the use of medical background resources for query expansion leads to small improvements in retrieval performance. Such resources appear to be especially useful to promote early precision.
dblp:conf/trec/HeHBVC11 fatcat:hbumk3r4kjevtdhmacmrt6tcsi