Oracle at Trec8: A Lexical Approach.

Abstract

Oracle's system for Trec8 was the interMedia Text retrieval engine integrated with the Oracle8i database and SQL query language. interMedia Text supports a novel theme-based document retrieval capability using an extensive lexical knowledge base. Trec8 queries constructed by extracting themes from topic titles and descriptions were manually refined. Queries were simple and intuitive. Oracle's results demonstrate that knowledge-based retrieval is a viable and scalable solution for information retrieval and that statistical training and tuning on the document collection is unnecessary for good performance in Trec. 1. Introduction Oracle's approach to Trec8 is a novel theme-based retrieval method implemented on top of traditional boolean techniques. Theme-based retrieval enables querying for documents that are about a certain theme or concept. The set of themes from a document together define what a document is about. Themes are extracted from documents and queries by parsing them usin...