Axiomatic Approaches to Information Retrieval--University of Delaware at TREC 2009 Million Query and Web Tracks

We report our experiments in TREC 2009 Million Query track and Adhoc task of Web track. Our goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of axiomatic retrieval models on the large data collection. Axiomatic approaches to information retrieval have been recently proposed and studied. The basic idea is to search for retrieval functions that can satisfy all the reasonable retrieval constraints. Previous studies showed that the derived basic axiomatic retrieval functions are less sensitive to the parameters than the other state of the art retrieval functions with comparable optimal performance. In this paper, we focus on evaluating the effectiveness of the basic axiomatic retrieval functions as well as the semantic term matching based query expansion strategy. Experiment results of the two tracks demonstrate the effectiveness of the axiomatic retrieval models.