All our submissions from the Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC) team this year continue to explore issues in IR from a perspective very close to that of the original Okapi team, working first at City University of London, and then at MSRC. A summary of the contributions by the team, from TRECs 1 to 7 is presented in [3]. In this work, weighting schemes for ad-hoc retrieval were developed, insp...

In this paper, we describe our work done by members at York University in Canada for the KIS (Known-item search) task of TRECVID 2010. This is the first time that we participate in the TRECVID. With rich experience in text retrieval, we mainly focus on the meta information of videos, and try to figure out the importance of these description corpus. In order to obtain this goal, we do not use an...

We study the problem of optimizing an individual base ranker using clicks. Surprisingly, while there has been considerable attention for using clicks to optimize linear combinations of base rankers, the problem of optimizing an individual base ranker using clicks has been ignored. The problem is different from the problem of optimizing linear combinations of base rankers as the scoring function...

The participation of the Information Management System (IMS) Group of the University of Padua in the Total Recall track at TREC 2016 consisted in a set of fully automated experiments based on the two-dimensional probabilistic model. We trained the model in two ways that tried to mimic a real user, and we compared it to two versions of the BM25 model with different parameter settings. This initi...

Despite all the advancements that have been made in the field of Information Retrieval, there are still so many challenges. These challenges are magnified when the information that is being retrieved is in a specialized domain such as healthcare. In order to tackle these challenges and encourage research in these domains, TREC (Text RETrival Conference) has instituted a Clinical Track in 2014. ...

This paper presents Strathclyde iSchool’s (SiS) participation in the Technological Assisted Reviews in Empirical Medicine Task. For the ranking task, we explored two ways in which assistance to reviewers could be provided during the assessment process: (i) topic models, where we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify topics within the set of retrieved documents, ranking documents by the to...

Web search over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks shows promise to become an alternative to the state-of-the-art search engines since P2P overlays offer means for decentralized search across widely-distributed document collections. However, the design of effective techniques for P2P indexing and retrieval raises a number of technical challenges due to potentially unscalable resource (e.g. bandwidth, ...

This report describes the work done at Océ Research for the TREC 2003. This first participation consists of ad hoc experiments for the Robust track. We used the BM25 model and our new probabilistic model to rank documents. Knowledge Concepts’ Content Enabler semantic network was used for stemming and query expansion. Our main goal was to compare the BM25 model and the probabilistic model implem...

Collection Processing Statistics We describe an evaluation experiment on GeoTemporal Document Retrieval created for the GeoTime evaluation task of NTCIR 2010. GeoTemporal Retrieval aims at to improve retrieval results using Geographic and Temporal dimensions of relevance. To accomplish that task, systems need to extract geographic and temporal information from the documents, and then explore se...

This paper describes our participation in the Blog track at the TREC 2008 evaluation campaign. The Blog track goes beyond simple document retrieval, its main goal is to identify opinionated blog posts and assign a polarity measure (positive, negative or mixed) to these information items. Available topics cover various target entities, such as people, location or product for example. This year’s...