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IRS Assignment
IRS Assignment
In this paper we have discussed about effects of query complexity, expansion and structure on retrieval
performance measured as precision and recall in probabilistic text retrieval were tested. Complexity
refers to the number of search facets or intersecting concepts in a query. Facets were divided into major and
minor facets on the basis of their importance with respect to a corresponding request. Two complexity
levels were tested: high complexity refers to queries using all search facets identified from requests, low
complexity was achieved by formulating queries with major facets only. There were five expansion types:
(1) the first query version was an unexpanded, original query with one search key for each search concept
(original search concepts) elicited from the test thesaurus;
(2) the synonyms of the original search keys were added to the original query;
(3) search keys representing the narrower concepts of the original search concepts were added to the
original query;
(4) search keys representing the associative concepts of the original search concepts were added to the
original query;
(5) all previous expansion keys were cumulatively added to the original query.
Query structure refers to the syntactic structure of a query expression, marked with query operators and
parentheses. The structure of queries was either weak (queries with no differentiated relations between
search keys, except weights) or strong (different relationships between search keys).