TY - GEN
T1 - On the potential search effectiveness of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms
AU - Liu, Ying Hsang
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - The creation of innovative techniques of document representation is critical to the development of effective information retrieval (IR) systems. In this paper, we report on the impact of state-of-the-art human indexing techniques, exemplified by MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms, in the document representation. We studied queries formulated by four different kinds of information seekers interactively using an experimental IR system: (1) search novices; (2) domain experts; (3) search experts and (4) medical librarians. The 3,442,321 documents came from the TREC 2004 Genomics Track document set. Effectiveness of retrieval was measured using the relevance judgments provided by TREC. Inclusion of MeSH terms in the document representation did not affect the effectiveness of queries with respect to precision and recall. Adding MeSH terms to the index did not have a positive impact on the effectiveness of queries formulated by different kinds of users. These findings contribute to our understanding of the associations between the users' cognitive space and the information objects in light of the principle of polyrepresentation.
AB - The creation of innovative techniques of document representation is critical to the development of effective information retrieval (IR) systems. In this paper, we report on the impact of state-of-the-art human indexing techniques, exemplified by MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms, in the document representation. We studied queries formulated by four different kinds of information seekers interactively using an experimental IR system: (1) search novices; (2) domain experts; (3) search experts and (4) medical librarians. The 3,442,321 documents came from the TREC 2004 Genomics Track document set. Effectiveness of retrieval was measured using the relevance judgments provided by TREC. Inclusion of MeSH terms in the document representation did not affect the effectiveness of queries with respect to precision and recall. Adding MeSH terms to the index did not have a positive impact on the effectiveness of queries formulated by different kinds of users. These findings contribute to our understanding of the associations between the users' cognitive space and the information objects in light of the principle of polyrepresentation.
KW - Information retrieval evaluation
KW - Interactive information retrieval
KW - MeSH terms
KW - User characteristics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77957944308&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1840784.1840817
DO - 10.1145/1840784.1840817
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781450302470
T3 - IIiX 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 Information Interaction in Context Symposium
SP - 225
EP - 233
BT - IIiX 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 Information Interaction in Context Symposium
T2 - 3rd Information Interaction in Context Symposium, IIiX'10
Y2 - 18 August 2010 through 21 August 2010
ER -