David Lillis: UCD SIFT in the TREC 2009 Web Track

UCD SIFT in the TREC 2009 Web Track

David Lillis, Fergus Toolan, Ling Lin, Rem W. Collier and John Dunnion

In E. M. Voorhees and L. P. Buckland, editors, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2009), Gaithersburg, MD, 2010. NIST.

Abstract

The SIFT (SIFT Information Fusion Techniques) group in UCD is dedicated to researching Data Fusion in Information Retrieval. This area of research involves the merging of multiple sets of results into a single result set that is presented to the user. As a means of evaluating the effectiveness of this work, the group entered Category B of the TREC 2009 Web Track. This paper discusses the strategies and experiments employed by the UCD SIFT group in entering the TREC Web Track 2009. This involved the use of freely-available Information Retrieval tools to provide inputs to the data fusion process, with the aim of contrasting with more sophisticated systems.