Overview of the INEX 2010 Ad Hoc Track

This paper gives an overview of the INEX 2010 Ad Hoc Track. The main goals of the Ad Hoc Track were three-fold. The first goal was to study focused retrieval under resource restricted conditions such as a small screen mobile device or a document summary on a hitlist. This leads to variants of the focused retrieval tasks that address the impact of result length/reading effort, thinking of focused retrieval as a form of “snippet” retrieval. The second goal was to extend the ad hoc retrieval test collection on the INEX 2009 Wikipedia Collection with additional topics and judgments. For this reason the Ad Hoc track topics and assessments stayed unchanged. The third goal was to examine the trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency by continuing the Efficiency Track as a task in the Ad Hoc Track. The INEX 2010 Ad Hoc Track featured four tasks: the Relevant in Context Task, the Restricted Relevant in Context Task, the Restrict Focused Task, and the Efficiency Task. We discuss the setup of the track, and the results for the four tasks.