Abstract

The TREC-3 project at Virginia Tech focused on methods for combining the evidence from multiple retrieval runs and queries to improve retrieval performance over any single retrieval method or query. The largest improvements result from the combination of retrieval paradigms rather than from the use of multiple similar queries. 1 Overview The primary focus of our experiments at Virginia Tech involved methods of combining the results from various divergent search schemes and document collections. In performing our TREC-3 ad-hoc retrieval experiments on the provided test collections, the results from both vector and P-norm [3] queries were considered in estimating the similarity for each document in an individual collection. The results for each collection were then merged to create a single final set of documents that would be presented to the user. Our TREC-3 experiments built upon our TREC-2 experiments and focused more on determining where the improvements in combination were derived...

Citations