NLPR at TREC 2004: Robust Experiments

It is the second time that the Chinese Information Processing group of NLPR participates in TREC. In the past, we have investigated the use of two key technologies: Window-based weighting method and Semantic Tree Model for query expansion, with success, to tasks in novelty and robust tracks. We focused on the Robust Retrieval Track at this year’s conference. Based on the previous IR architecture, our research on this year's robust mainly focused on three aspects: (1) two-step retrieval scheme; (2) word sense entropy; (3) several strategies for merging multiple runs.