Expanding Queries Using Multiple Resources

We describe our participation in the TREC 2006 Genomics track, in which our main focus was on query expansion. We hypothesized that applying query expansion techniques would help us both to identify and retrieve synonymous terms, and to cope with ambiguity. To this end, we developed several collection-specific as well as online strategies. Our proposed methods yield a noticeable improvement in retrieval performance over the baseline. To counter the negative effects of query expansion on recall, we introduce conjunctive Boolean constraints on the query terms and added expansion terms. When these additional constraints are imposed, results improve even further. The improvements in our results are noticeable on the document, passage, as well as aspect level.

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