The GUC Goes to TREC 2004: Using Whole or Partial Documents for Retrieval and Classification in the Genomics Track

We were interested in examining the relative effect of using parts of the documents, different combinations of parts of the documents, or whole documents on retrieval and classification. We were also interested in the effect of MeSH terms on retrieval. Our experiments show that indexing titles, abstracts, and MeSH terms for adhoc retrieval yielded statistically significantly better results than any other part or combination of parts, with abstracts outperforming any other individual part of the documents. In the triage sub-task, using whole documents for training a classifier outperformed using titles, abstracts, diagram captions, MeSH terms, and windows of text around gene names. However, training a classifier using the combination of titles, abstracts, and MeSH terms produced results comparable to using whole documents.