Susan Price - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Papers by Susan Price
Information Processing and Management, 2001
Two common assumptions held by information retrieval researchers are that searching using Boolean... more Two common assumptions held by information retrieval researchers are that searching using Boolean operators is inferior to natural language searching and that results from batch-style retrieval evaluations are generalizable to the real-world searching. We challenged these assumptions in the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) interactive track, with real users following a consensus protocol to search for an instance recall task. Our results showed that Boolean and natural language searching achieved comparable results and that the results from batch evaluations were not comparable to those obtained in experiments with real users. Ó
We carried out experiments designed to investigate this question. After identi~ing a weighting sc... more We carried out experiments designed to investigate this question. After identi~ing a weighting scheme that gave maximum improvement over the baseline in a noninteractive evaluation, we used it with real users searching on an instance recall task. Our results showed the weighting scheme giving beneficial results in batch studies did not do so with real users. Further analysis did identi~ other factors predictive of instance recall, including number of documents saved by the user, document recall, and number of documents seen by the user.
Objectives: Assess query expansion using thesaurus relationships and definitions in the UMLS Meta... more Objectives: Assess query expansion using thesaurus relationships and definitions in the UMLS Metathesaurus for improving searching performance. Methods: The queries from a MEDLINE test collection (OHSUMED) were expanded using synonym, hierarchical, and related term information as well as term definitions from the UMLS Metathesaurus. Documents were retrieved from a word-statistical retrieval system and assessed for recall and precision based on relevance judgments from the test collection. Results: All types of query expansion degraded aggregate retrieval performance as measured by recall and precision, although 38.6% of the queries with synonym expansion and up to 29.7% of the queries with hierarchical expansion showed improvement. Conclusions: Thesaurus-based query expansion causes a decline in retrieval performance generally but improves it in specific instances. Further research must focus on identifying instances where performance improves and how it can be exploited by real users.
Information Processing and Management, 2001
Two common assumptions held by information retrieval researchers are that searching using Boolean... more Two common assumptions held by information retrieval researchers are that searching using Boolean operators is inferior to natural language searching and that results from batch-style retrieval evaluations are generalizable to the real-world searching. We challenged these assumptions in the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) interactive track, with real users following a consensus protocol to search for an instance recall task. Our results showed that Boolean and natural language searching achieved comparable results and that the results from batch evaluations were not comparable to those obtained in experiments with real users. Ó
We carried out experiments designed to investigate this question. After identi~ing a weighting sc... more We carried out experiments designed to investigate this question. After identi~ing a weighting scheme that gave maximum improvement over the baseline in a noninteractive evaluation, we used it with real users searching on an instance recall task. Our results showed the weighting scheme giving beneficial results in batch studies did not do so with real users. Further analysis did identi~ other factors predictive of instance recall, including number of documents saved by the user, document recall, and number of documents seen by the user.
Objectives: Assess query expansion using thesaurus relationships and definitions in the UMLS Meta... more Objectives: Assess query expansion using thesaurus relationships and definitions in the UMLS Metathesaurus for improving searching performance. Methods: The queries from a MEDLINE test collection (OHSUMED) were expanded using synonym, hierarchical, and related term information as well as term definitions from the UMLS Metathesaurus. Documents were retrieved from a word-statistical retrieval system and assessed for recall and precision based on relevance judgments from the test collection. Results: All types of query expansion degraded aggregate retrieval performance as measured by recall and precision, although 38.6% of the queries with synonym expansion and up to 29.7% of the queries with hierarchical expansion showed improvement. Conclusions: Thesaurus-based query expansion causes a decline in retrieval performance generally but improves it in specific instances. Further research must focus on identifying instances where performance improves and how it can be exploited by real users.