Menagerie of Tracks at Maryland: HARD, Enterprise, QA, and Genomics, Oh My

摘要

This year, the University of Maryland participated in four separate tracks: HARD, enterprise, question answering, and genomics. Our HARD experiments involved a trained intermediary who searched for documents on behalf of the user, created clarification forms manually, and exploited user responses accordingly. The aim was to better understand the nature of single- iteration clarification dialogs and to develop an 'ontology of clarifications' that can be leveraged to guide system development. For the enterprise track, we submitted official runs to the Known Item Search and the Discussion Search tasks. Document transformation to normalize dates and version numbers was found to be helpful, but suppression of text quoted from earlier messages and expansion of the indexed terms for a message based on subject line threading proved to not be. For the QA track, we submitted a manual run of 'other' questions in an effort to quantify human performance on the task. Our genomics track participation was in collaboration with the National Library of Medicine, and is primarily reported in NLM's overview paper.