Abstract

As larger and more heterogeneous text databases become available, information retrieval research will depend on the development of powerful, efficient and flexible retrieval engines. In this paper, we describe a retrieval system (INQUERY) that is based on a probabilistic retrieval model and provides support for sophisticated indexing and complex query formulation. INQUERY has been used successfully with databases containing nearly 400,000 documents. 1 Introduction The increasing interest in sophisticated information retrieval (IR) techniques has led to a number of large text databases becoming available for research. The size of these databases, both in terms of the number of documents in them, and the length of the documents that are typically full text, has presented significant challenges to IR researchers who are used to experimenting with two or three thousand document abstracts. In order to carry out research with different types of text representations, retrieval models, learni...

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