CSIRO’s Participation in INEX 2006

Abstract

In this year’s INEX participation, CSIRO took part in the Ad-hoc Track, contributing to three of the four given tasks, namely the Thorough Task, the Focused Task and the Best in Context Task.

We relied on our own text-and-metadata retrieval system PADRE for indexing the data and processing the queries. Since PADRE is designed to retrieve documents rather than XML elements we preprocessed the collection to enable retrieval of sub-elements. From the set of queries we identified all the element-types required to be retrieved. We then added new pseudo documents corresponding to all the retrievable elements from the originals. Finally, this expanded collection was indexed with PADRE.

When processing queries, query elements were extracted from the INEX topics and pre-processed to generate queries in PADRE syntax. Results were post-processed to achieve the requirements of each particular task, such as elimination of super- and sub-elements of elements already retrieved.

Results obtained from this simple-minded approach were not particularly competitive but serve as a good basis for identification of necessary future enhancements.