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European Conference on Information Retrieval

ECIR 2011: Advances in Information Retrieval pp 277–282Cite as

The Limits of Retrieval Effectiveness

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6611))

Abstract

Best match systems in Information Retrieval have long been one of the most predominant models used in both research and practice. It is argued that the effectiveness of these types of systems for the ad hoc task in IR has plateaued. In this short paper, we conduct experiments to find the upper limits of performance of these systems from three different perspectives. Our results on TREC data show that there is much room for improvement in terms of term-weighting and query reformulation in the ad hoc task given an entire information need.

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK

    Ronan Cummins

  2. Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain

    Mounia Lalmas

  3. Dept. of Information Technology, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Ronan Cummins & Colm O’Riordan

Authors
  1. Ronan Cummins
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  2. Mounia Lalmas
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  3. Colm O’Riordan
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information School, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, S1 4DP, Sheffield, UK

    Paul Clough

  2. CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Colum Foley , Cathal Gurrin  & Hyowon Lee ,  & 

  3. Centre for Next Generation Localisation, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Gareth J. F. Jones

  4. TNO Human Factors, Brassersplein 2, 2612 CT, Delft, The Netherlands

    Wessel Kraaij

  5. Yahoo! Research, 177 Diagonal, 08018, Barcelona, Spain

    Vanessa Mudoch

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Cite this paper

Cummins, R., Lalmas, M., O’Riordan, C. (2011). The Limits of Retrieval Effectiveness. In: Clough, P., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6611. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20160-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20161-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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