Dublin City University Experiments in Connectivity Analysis for TREC-9

Dublin City University (DCU) took part in the Web Track (small task) in TREC-9. Our experiments were based on evaluating a number of connectivity analysis algorithms that we hoped would produce a marked improvement over a baseline Vector Space model system. Our connectivity experiments are all based on non-iterative post-query algorithms, which rerank a set of documents returned from content-only VSM queries. We feel that in order to implement a real-world system based on connectivity analysis the algorithms must have a low query-time processing overhead, hence our employment of noniterative algorithms. Our results showed that we were unable to improve over a content-only run with our algorithms. We believe this to be mainly due to the nature of the link structure within the WT10g dataset.