This paper presents a system that retrieves descriptive phrases of proper nouns from free
text. Sentences holding the specified noun are ranked using a technique based on pattern …

The goal of query performance prediction is to estimate a query's retrieval effectiveness
without user feedback. Past research has investigated the usefulness of query performance …

UIUC participated in the HARD track in TREC 2004 and focused on the evaluation of a new
method for identifying variable-length passages using HMMs. Most existing approaches to …

Question answering (QA) systems often contain an information retrieval subsystem that
identifies documents or passages where the answer to a question might appear [1–3, 5, 6 …

The wealth of information on the web makes it an attractive resource for seeking quick
answers to simple, factual questions such as" who was the first American in space?" or" what …

People browsing the web or reading a document may see text passages that describe a
topic of interest, and want to know more about it by searching. Manually formulating a query …

This paper describes a test collection (benchmark data) for retrieval systems driven by
spoken queries. This collection was produced in the subtask of the NTCIR-3 Web retrieval …

It has been shown that using phrases properly in the document retrieval leads to higher
retrieval effectiveness. In this paper, we define four types of noun phrases and present an …

The design of the AskMSR question answering system is motivated by recent observations
in natural language processing that for many applications, significant improvements in …

We present a novel contextualization approach for passage retrieval. The core principle is to
let any occurrence of a query term in a document affect the passage retrieval score, whether …