Structural Term Extraction for Expansion of Template-Based Genomic Queries

This paper describes our experiments run to address the ad hoc task of the TREC 2005 Genomics track. The task topics were expressed with 5 different structures called Generic Topic Templates (GTTs). We hypothesized the presence of GTTspecific structural terms in the free-text fields of documents relevant to a topic instantiated from that same GTT. Our experiments aimed at extracting and selecting candidate structural terms for each GTT. Selected terms were used to expand initial queries and the quality of the term selection was measured by the impact of the expansion on initial search results. The evaluation used the task training topics and the associated relevance information. This paper describes the two term extraction methods used in the experiments and the resulting two runs sent to NIST for evaluation.