Using clustering and SuperConcepts within SMART: TREC 6

Abstract The SMART information retrieval project emphasizes completely automatic approaches to the understanding and retrieval of large quantities of text. We continue our work in TREC 6, performing runs in the routing, ad hoc, and foreign language environments, including cross-lingual runs. The major focus for TREC 6 is on trying to maintain the balance of the query — attempting to ensure the various aspects of the original query are appropriately addressed, especially while adding expansion terms. Exactly the same procedure is used for foreign language environments as for English; our tenet is that good information retrieval techniques are more powerful than linguistic knowledge. We also give an interesting cross-lingual run, assuming that French and English are closely enough related so that a query in one language can be run directly on a collection in the other language by just ‘correcting’ the spelling of the query words. This is quite successful for most queries.