José Luis Vicedo González

IR-n: A Passage Retrieval System at CLEF-2001

Previous work demonstrates that information retrieval system performance is sensibly improved when using document passages as the basic unit of information. However, the IR community has not yet arrived at consensus about the best way of defining text passages for retrieval purposes. This paper reports on experiments with the IR-n system, an information retrieval system that applies a new method for passage selection. Passages are defined as a fixed number of adjoining sentences in a document. This approach has been tested for the monolingual (Spanish) and bilingual (Spanish-English) tasks at CLEF-2001 with different success rates.

Text Segmentation for Efficient Information Retrieval

Previous works in Information Retrieval show that using pieces of text obtain better results than using the whole document as the basic unit to compare with the users query. This kind of IR systems is usually called Passage Retrieval (PR). However, there is not a general agreement about how one should define those pieces of text (also known as passages), in order to obtain an optimum performance. This paper proposes a PR system based on a novel selection of variable size passages. It presents an evaluation that shows better results than a standard IR system and several well-known PR systems.

Using a Passage Retrieval System to Support Question Answering Process

Previous works in Information Retrieval show that using pieces of text obtain better results than using the whole document as the basic unit to compare with the users query. This kind of IR systems is usually called Passage Retrieval (PR). This paper discusses the use of our PR system in the question answering process (QA). Our main objective is to examine if a PR system provide a better support for QA than Information Retrieval systems based in the whole document.

Using Long Queries in a Passage Retrieval System

Previous works in Information Retrieval show that using pieces of text obtain better results than using the whole document as the basic unit to compare with the users query. This kind of IR systems is usually called Passage Retrieval (PR). However, there is not a general agreement about how one should define those pieces of text (also known as passages), in order to obtain an optimum performance. This paper proposes a PR system based on a novel selection of variable size passages. It presents an evaluation that shows better results than a standard IR system and several well-known PR systems. Also, the influence of short queries with reference to long queries is evaluated.