Focused search in books and Wikipedia: categories, links and relevance feedback

In this paper we describe our participation in INEX 2009 in the Ad Hoc Track, the Book Track, and the Entity Ranking Track. In the Ad Hoc track we investigate focused link evidence, using only links from retrieved sections. The new collection is not only annotated with Wikipedia categories, but also with YAGO/WordNet categories. We explore how we can use both types of category information, in the Ad Hoc Track as well as in the Entity Ranking Track. Results in the Ad Hoc Track show Wikipedia categories are more effective than WordNet categories, and Wikipedia categories in combination with relevance feedback lead to the best results. Preliminary results of the Book Track show full-text retrieval is effective for high early precision. Relevance feedback further increases early precision. Our findings for the Entity Ranking Track are in direct opposition of our Ad Hoc findings, namely, that the WordNet categories are more effective than the Wikipedia categories. This marks an interesting difference between ad hoc search and entity ranking.