The Lowlands' TREC Experiments 2005

This paper describes our participation to the TREC HARD track (High Accuracy Retrieval of Documents) and the TREC Enterprise track. The main goal of our HARD participation is the development and evaluation of so-called query profiles: Short summaries of the retrieved results that enable the user to perform more focused search, for instance by zooming in on a particular time period. The main goal of our Enterprise track participation is to investigate the potential of the structural information for this type of retrieval task. In particular, we study the use of the thread information and the subject and header fields of the email documents. As a secondary and long standing research goal, we aim at developing an information retrieval framework that supports many diverse retrieval applications by means of one simple yet powerful query language (similar to SQL or relational algebra) that hides the implementation details of retrieval approaches from the application developer, while still giving the application developer control over the ranking process. Both the HARD system and the Enterprise system (as well as our TRECVID video retrieval system [14]) are based on MonetDB, an open source database system developed at CWI [1].

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