UB at TREC-Genomics 2006: Using Passage Retrieval and Pre-retrieval Query Expansion for Genomics IR Abstract

This paper presents the results of the University at Buffalo (UB) in TREC genomics. For this task we used the SMART retrieval system and a pre retrieval expansion method that uses the ABGene and MetaMap tools. We tried two different weighting schemes one using pivoted length normalization (Lnu.ltu) and another using augmented tf-idf (atn.ann). The results show that performance of pivoted length normalization is very close to the median system that participated in the Genomics track. The augmented tf-idf performs significantly above the median system showing an improvement of 21%. This seems to indicate that a simpler weighting scheme could work better for retrieval of relevant passages