SP500207 Site Report for the Text REtrieval Conference chapter P. Nelson National Institute of Standards and Technology Donna K. Harman * Query By Example: It is possible to submit an entire document as a query, which is called "query by example." Essentially, the document is used as an example, and documents similar to it are retrieved. This function works even when the example document is very large. * Search Within: A query can be directed to search only within a small set of documents. The set of documents is often selected from a previous query. This function is also called "recursive" search or "recurrent" search. This function is especially useful when a statistical query searches over the results of an earlier boolean query, or visa-versa. * Numeric and Date Ranges: ConQuest can fmd documents which contain numbers or dates within a specified range. Numbers are subject to the standard proximity tests in the boolean and natural language queries, just like other words. * Fielded Searches: A search can be restricted to any particular field in a documenL For example, a users often wish to search only over the "authors" field, and not over the full body of the text. * Document Categories: Documents in ConQuest can be categorized as appropriate. Users can target searches to occur only over a single category, or over multiple categories. Evaluation Results ConQuest had the highest overall score in ThEC for Category A systems (the full 2.5 Gigabyte database) using the 11 point averages. In comparing ConQuest to other systems, we found the following two graphs to be useful. 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% II ii II Best no, `1l0 -20% -40% -60% -80% II `I I- -II -I I I I III II III III I- II dl dl dl . . - - - - - - - Average -100% Worst Figure 5 ConQuest vs All Systems for the 39 Non-Zero Queries Category A, Manual Mode This first graph (figure 5) shows the results of ConQuest for the 39 non-zero queries (the remaining 11 queries had no relevant documents in the database). Ascore of 100% represents the best of all Category A systems, a score of - 100% represents the worst of all Category A systems. A score of 0% represents average performance. 294