Resolution Power of Search Keys

Employing the Resolution Power of Search Keys

Ari Pirkola and Kalervo Järvelin

Department of Information Studies
University of Tampere
P.O.Box 607
FIN-33101 TAMPERE, Finland

Pirkola, A. & Järvelin, K (2001). Employing the Resolution Power of Search Keys. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 52(): xx-yy, to appear.

Abstract

Search key resolution power is analyzed in the context of a request, i.e., among the set of search keys for the request. Methods of characterizing the resolution power of keys automatically are studied and the effects search keys of varying resolution power have on retrieval effectiveness are analyzed. It is shown that it often is possible to identify the best key of a query while the discrimination between the remaining keys presents problems. It is also shown that query performance is improved by suitably using the best key in a structured query. The tests were run with InQuery1 in a subcollection of the TREC collection, which contained some 515.000 documents.


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1 The InQuery software was provided by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, University of Massachusetts Computer Science Department, Amherst, MA, USA.