Abstract

This paper describes V-Twin, an information access toolkit designed to provide indexing and search capabilities for a variety of applications. We discuss the phenomenon of very short queries generated by users of interactive search services, and summarize a new technique we are using in V-Twin to handle these queries more effectively. We then present some results based on V-Twin's performance at the TREC-5 ad hoc task. VTwin achieved a high level of performance despite having much lower index overhead and memory footprint than other systems participating in TREC. 1. V-Twin Background V-Twin is the code name of the Apple Information Access Toolkit (AIAT), originally created in Apple Research Labs and now available for licensing by Apple developers. The toolkit consists of a library of C++ classes designed to be linked to a front-end application. V-Twin is based on the standard vector model of information retrieval, with a variant of tf x idf weighting and length normalization. V-Twin ...

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