Moving More Quickly toward Full Term Relations in Information Space

This paper describes the ISpace retrieval system's involvement in TREC8. The main goal for this year's work was to speed up document indexing and query processing compared to previous years. This goal was achieved, but retrieval performance was not as good as for TREC7. System details for the AdHoc task, small Web task, and large Web (VLC) task are presented. The AdHoc task emphasized query expansion, while the large Web track emphasized rapid indexing and retrieval. The paper describes an implementation of a multidimensional tree structure for retrieval from information space based on the kd-tree. The larger setting for ISpace, the TeraScale Retrieval project, is summarized. A concluding section describes plans for ISpace. School of Information and Library Science, Campus box 3360 Manning Hall, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3360