Recent Experiments with INQUERY

Abstract : Past TREC experiments by the University of Massachusetts have focused primarily on ad hoc query creation. Substantial effort was directed towards automatically translating TREC topics into queries using a set of simple heuristics and query expansion. Less emphasis was placed on the routing task although results were generally good. The Spanish experiments in TREC-3 concentrated on simple indexing sophisticated stemming and simple methods of creating queries. The TREC-4 experiments were a departure from the past. The ad hoc experiments involved "fine tuning" existing approaches and modifications to the INQUERY term weighting algorithm. However, much of the research focus in TREC-4 was on the routing, Spanish, and collection merging experiments. These tracks more closely match our broader research interests in document routing document filtering distributed IR, and multilingual retrieval. The University of Massachusetts experiments were conducted with version 3.0 of the INQUERY information retrieval system. INQUERY is based on the Bayesian inference network retrieval model. It is described elsewhere [7, 5, 12, 11], so this paper focuses on relevant differences to the previously published algorithms.