Abstract

This paper briefly describes the features of the Cheshire II system and how it was used in the TREC 6 Interactive track. The results of the interactive track are discussed and future improvements to the Cheshire II system are considered. 1 Introduction The Cheshire II system was originally designed to apply probabilistic retrieval methods to searching in online library catalogs in order to help overcome the twin problems of topical searching that are pervasive in "second generation" Boolean online catalogs: search failure and information overload. It was originally intended to be a next-generation online catalog and full-text information retrieval system that would apply probabilistic retrieval methods to simple MARC records and clustered record surrogates (Classification clusters)(Larson 1991c; Larson, et al. 1996). Over time the system has been explanded to include support for full-text SGML documents (ranging from simple document types as used in the TREC database to complex fullte...

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