University of Glasgow at TREC 2007: Experiments in Blog and Enterprise Tracks with Terrier

In TREC 2007, we participate in four tasks of the Blog and Enterprise tracks. We continue experiments using Terrier [14], our modular and scalable Information Retrieval (IR) platform, and the Divergence From Randomness (DFR) framework. In particular, for the Blog track opinion finding task, we propose a statistical term weighting approach to identify opinionated documents. An alternative approach based on an opinion identification tool is also utilised. Overall, a 15% improvement over a non-opinionated baseline is observed in applying the statistical term weighting approach. In the Expert Search task of the Enterprise track, we investigate the use of proximity between query terms and candidate name occurrences in documents.