Approaches to collection selection and results merging for distributed information retrieval

ABSTRACT

We have investigated two major issues in Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR), namely: collection selection and search results merging. While most published works on these two issues are based on pre-stored metadata, the approaches described in this paper involve extracting the required information at the time the query is processed. In order to predict the relevance of collections to a given query, we analyse a limited number of full documents (e.g., the top five documents) retrieved from each collection and then consider term proximity within them. On the other hand, our merging technique is rather simple since input only requires document scores and lengths of results lists. Our experiments evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of these approaches and compare them with centralised indexing and various other DIR techniques (e.g., CORI). We conducted our experiments using two testbeds: one containing news articles extracted from four different sources (2 GB) and another containing 10 GB of Web pages. Our evaluations demonstrate that the retrieval effectiveness of our simple approaches is worth considering.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Query processing

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.7 Natural Language Processing
          Subjects: Text analysis

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Performance

Keywords:
collection selection, distributed information retrieval, evaluation, merging, search results