Blind Relevance Feedback and Named Entity Based Query Expansion for Geographic Retrieval at GeoCLEF 2006

• Published in: Evaluation of Multilingual and Multi-modal Information Retrieval pp. 946 - 953
• Main Authors: Bischoff, Kerstin, Mandl, Thomas, Womser-Hacker, Christa
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Geographic Information System; Name Entity; Name Entity Recognition; Original Query; Query Expansion
• ISBN: 9783540749981; 3540749985
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-74999-8_121

In its participation at GeoCLEF 2006, the University of Hildesheim focused on the monolingual German and English and the bilingual German ←→ English tasks. Based on the results of GeoCLEF 2005, the weighting of and the expansion with geographic named entities (NE) within a Boolean retrieval approach was examined. Because the best results 2005 were achieved with Blind Relevance Feedback (BRF) in which NEs seemed to play a crucial role, the effects of adding particular geographic NEs within the BRF are explored. The paper presents a description of the system design, the submitted runs and results. A first analysis of unofficial post experiments indicates that geographic NEs can improve BRF and supports prior findings that the geographical expansion within a Boolean retrieval approach does not necessarily lead to better results – as it is often assumed. The discussion is followed by planned future research activies.