Indexing Using Both N-Grams and Words

Goals The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) is a first-time entrant in the TREC Category A evaluation. The focus of our information retrieval research is on the relative value of and interaction among multiple term types. In particular, we are interested in examining both words and n-grams as indexing terms. The relative values of words and n-grams have been disputed; to our knowledge though, no one has previously studied their relative merits while holding all other aspects of the system constant.