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Improving Full-Text Precision on Short Queries using Simple Constraints (1996)
| Venue: | Proceedings of the Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval |
| Citations: | 34 - 0 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Hearst96improvingfull-text,
author = {Marti A. Hearst},
title = {Improving Full-Text Precision on Short Queries using Simple Constraints},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval},
year = {1996},
pages = {217--228}
}
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Abstract
We show that two simple constraints, when applied to short user queries (on the order of 5--10 words) can yield precision scores comparable to or better than those achieved using long queries (50--85 words) at low document cutoff levels. These constraints are meant to detect documents that have subtopic passages that includes the most important components of the query. The constraints are: (i) a simple Boolean constraint which requires the user to specify the query as a list of topics; this list is converted into a conjunct of disjuncts by the system, and (ii) a subtopic-sized proximity constraint imposed over the Boolean constraint. The vector space model is used to rank the documents that satisfy both constraints. Experiments run over 45 TREC queries show significant, almost consistent improvements over rankings that use no constraints. These results have important ramifications for interactive systems intended for casual users, such as those searching on the World Wide Web. 1 Introd...
Keyphrases
simple constraint short query full-text precision world wide web trec query casual user subtopic-sized proximity constraint simple boolean constraint user query important component consistent improvement boolean constraint long query low document cutoff level important ramification interactive system vector space model precision score
