Reports three explorations of Ranked system design. Two tests used a Cystic Fibrosis test collection with 100 queries. Experiment 1 compared a Boolean with a Ranked interactive system using a subject-qualified trained searcher, and reporting Recall and Precision results. Experiment 2 compared fifteen different Ranked match algo rithms in a batch mode using two test collections, and included some new proximate pairs and term weighting approaches. Experiment 3 is a design plan for an interactive Ranked prototype offering mid-search algorithm choices plus other manual search devices (such as obligatory and unwanted terms), as influenced by thinking-aloud comments from experiment 1.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
D.K. Harman , The first text retrieval conference (TREC-1 , 1992, Information Processing and Management29 (1993) 411-414.
2.
I. Hsieh-Yee , Effects of search experience and subject knowledge on the search tactics of novice and experienced searchers, Journal of the American Society for Information Science44 (1993) 161-174.
3.
E.M. Keen, Query Reformulation in Ranked Output Interaction [ Paper presented at the Information Retrieval Conference, British Computer Society, March 1993] (In press).
4.
S-C. Chang et al., Multilevel ranking in large text collections using FAIRS In: D.K. Harman (ed.), The First Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-1) (NIST, Gaithersburg, MD, 1993) pp. 329-336.
5.
E.A. Fox et al., Combining evidence from multiple searches In: D.K. Harman (ed.), The First Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-1) (NIST, Gaithersburg, MD, 1993) pp. 319-328.
6.
W.M. Shaw et al., The cystic fibrosis database: content and research opportunities, Library and Information Science Research13 (1991) 347-366.
7.
R. Burgin , Variations in relevance judgments and the evaluation of retrieval performance, Information Processing and Management28 (1992) 619-627.
8.
W.M. Shaw , Jr, Controlled and uncontrolled subject descriptions in the CF database: a comparison of optimal cluster-based retrieval results , Information Processing and Management29 (1993) 751-763.
9.
E.M. Keen , The use of term position devices in ranked output experiments, Journal of Documentation47 (1991) 1-22.
10.
E.M. Keen, Performance comparisons of Boolean and Ranked output retrieval In: A. McEnery and C. Paice (eds), Proceedings of the 14th Information Retrieval Colloquium, British Computer Society, University of Lancaster, 13-14 April 1992 (Workshops in Computing Series) (Springer-Verlag, London, 1993) pp. 89-101.
11.
E.M. Keen, Query term weighting schemes for effective ranked output retrieval. In: Online Information 91, Proceedings of the 15th International Online Information Meeting, December (Learned Information, Oxford, 1991) pp. 135-142.
12.
E.M. Keen , Term position ranking: some new test results In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual International Association for Computing Machinery SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Copenhagen, June 1992 (Association for Computing Machinery, 1992) pp. 66-76.
