TextMESS at GeoCLEF 2008: Result Merging with Fuzzy Borda Ranking

This paper describe the joint participation by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and the Universidad of Jaén to the GeoCLEF task. This activity has been carried out within the framework of the Spanish TextMESS project (Intelligent, Interactive and Multilingual Text Mining based on Human Language Technologies). The method employed for the participation is a result merging algorithm based on the fuzzy Borda voting scheme. This method takes as input the two document lists returned by the two systems developed by the participating groups and creates a document list where the documents are ranked according to the fuzzy Borda voting scheme. The results obtained are better than the individual systems, and also ones of the best ones of the task (second as group). However, the best result was obtained with a run which combined the baseline systems. The analysis of the results showed that the best runs were those in which only title and description were used, and unfortunately we chose to submit only a run of this type, with the base systems. The results confirm the effectiveness of the fuzzy Borda scheme for the combination of different systems.