{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.015332197614991482, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0008517887563884157, 'mean_word_length': 5.283422459893048, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
TREC-3: Experience With Conceptual Relations in Information Retrieval

This report describes an experiment evaluating the performance gains that can be achieve by using high-level conceptual relations in information retrieval. The objective of the experiment is to determine if conceptual relations can improve overall retrieval performance and, if so, under what conditions using relations is likely to be justified. We represent five TREC topics each as two concepts linked by a single relation, where a concept corresponds to a noun phrase and a relation corresponds to a verb phrase or a noun phrase that describes an action, activity, or relationship. A Boolean search (with proximity) is associated with each concept and a parameterized search with each relation. We then compare the performance of the expanded concept-relation-concept representation with the searches for the two concepts linked by each of several proximity operators. Our results show that use of relations can provide significant performance improvements but that the improvements are dependent on the nature of the two concepts and the relation with respect to the text collection being searched.