The AID Group at TREC Genomics 2005

This paper describes our participation in the TREC 2005 Genomics track. We took part in the ad hoc retrieval task and aimed at integrat- ing thesauri in the retrieval model. We devel- oped three thesauri-based methods, two of which made use of the existing MeSH theasurus and terms. One method uses blind relevance feed- back on MeSH terms, the other uses an index of the MeSH thesaurus for query expansion. The third method makes use of a dynamically gener- ated lookup list, by which gene acronyms and syn- onyms could be inferred. We show that, despite the relatively minor improvements in retrieval per- formance of individually applied methods, a com- bination works best and is able to deliver signifi- cant improvements over the baseline.