Back to Basics – Again – for Domain-Specific Retrieval

Abstract

In this paper we will describe Berkeley’s approach to the Domain-Specific (DS) track for CLEF 2008. Last year we used Entry Vocabulary Indexes and Thesaurus expansion approaches for DS, but found in later testing that some simple text retrieval approaches had better results than these more complex query expansion approaches. This year we decided to revisit our basic text retrieval approaches and see how they would stack up against the various expansion approaches used by other groups. The results are now in and the answer is clear, they perform pretty badly compared to other groups’ approaches.

All of the runs submitted were performed using the Cheshire II system. This year the Berkeley/Cheshire group submitted a total of twenty-four runs, including two for each subtask of the DS track. These include six Monolingual runs for English, German, and Russian, twelve Bilingual runs (four X2EN, four X2DE, and four X2RU), and six Multilingual runs (two EN, two DE, and two RU). The overall results include Cheshire runs in the top five participants for each task, but usually as the lowest of the five (and often fewer) groups.