Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)
System Description

Organization Name: University of Glasgow Run ID: Gla6DS1
Section 1.0 System Summary and Timing
Section 1.1 System Information
Hardware Model Used for TREC Experiment: Sun ULTRA2
System Use: SHARED
Total Amount of Hard Disk Storage: 43 Gb
Total Amount of RAM: 256 MB
Clock Rate of CPU: 2x200 MHz
Section 1.2 System Comparisons
Amount of developmental "Software Engineering": NONE
List of features that are not present in the system, but would have been beneficial to have:
List of features that are present in the system, and impacted its performance, but are not detailed within this form:
Section 2.0 Construction of Indices, Knowledge Bases, and Other Data Structures
Length of the stopword list: 563 words
Type of Stemming: PORTER
Controlled Vocabulary: NO
Term weighting: YES
  • Additional Comments on term weighting: Dempster-Shafer
Phrase discovery: YES
  • Kind of phrase: Noun Phrases
  • Method used: SYNTACTIC
Type of Spelling Correction: NONE
Manually-Indexed Terms: NO
Proper Noun Identification:
Syntactic Parsing: YES
Tokenizer: YES
Word Sense Disambiguation: NO
Other technique: NO
Additional comments:
Section 3.0 Statistics on Data Structures Built from TREC Text
Section 3.1 First Data Structure
Structure Type: INVERTED INDEX
Type of other data structure used:
Brief description of method using other data structure:
Total storage used: 2 Gb
Total computer time to build: hours
Automatic process: YES
Manual hours required: hours
Type of manual labor: NONE
Term positions used: NO
Only single terms used: NO
Concepts (vs. single terms) represented: NO
  • Number of concepts represented:
Type of representation:
Auxilary files used: NO
  • Type of auxilary files used:
Additional comments:
Section 3.2 Second Data Structure
Structure Type:
Type of other data structure used:
Brief description of method using other data structure:
Total storage used: Gb
Total computer time to build: hours
Automatic process:
Manual hours required: hours
Type of manual labor: NONE
Term positions used:
Only single terms used:
Concepts (vs. single terms) represented:
  • Number of concepts represented:
Type of representation:
Auxilary files used:
  • Type of auxilary files used:
Additional comments:
Section 3.3 Third Data Structure
Structure Type:
Type of other data structure used:
Brief description of method using other data structure:
Total storage used: Gb
Total computer time to build: hours
Automatic process:
Manual hours required: hours
Type of manual labor: NONE
Term positions used:
Only single terms used:
Concepts (vs. single terms) represented:
  • Number of concepts represented:
Type of representation:
Auxilary files used:
  • Type of auxilary files used:
Additional comments:
Section 4.0 Data Built from Sources Other than the Input Text
Internally-built Auxiliary File

File type: NONE
Domain type: DOMAIN INDEPENDENT
Total Storage: Gb
Number of Concepts Represented: concepts
Type of representation: NONE
Automatic or Manual:
  • Total Time to Build: hours
  • Total Time to Modify (if already built): hours
Type of Manual Labor used: NONE
Additional comments:
Externally-built Auxiliary File

File is: NONE
Total Storage: Gb
Number of Concepts Represented: concepts
Type of representation: NONE
Additional comments:
Section 5.0 Computer Searching
Average computer time to search (per query): CPU seconds
Times broken down by component(s):
Section 5.1 Searching Methods
Vector space model:
Probabilistic model:
Cluster searching:
N-gram matching:
Boolean matching:
Fuzzy logic:
Free text scanning:
Neural networks:
Conceptual graphic matching:
Other: YES
Additional comments: A Dempster-Shafer belief function is used for retrieval
Section 5.2 Factors in Ranking
Term frequency: YES
Inverse document frequency: YES
Other term weights: NO
Semantic closeness: NO
Position in document: NO
Syntactic clues: YES
Proximity of terms: NO
Information theoretic weights: NO
Document length: YES
Percentage of query terms which match: NO
N-gram frequency: NO
Word specificity: NO
Word sense frequency: NO
Cluster distance: NO
Other: YES
Additional comments: A tf*idf function was used. The formula was modified to be complient with the Dempster-Shafer theory.
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