Overview of the INEX 2007 Ad Hoc Track

This paper gives an overview of the INEX 2007 Ad Hoc Track. The main purpose of the Ad Hoc Track was to investigate the value of the internal document structure (as provided by the XML mark-up) for retrieving relevant information. For this reason, the retrieval results were liberalized to arbitrary passages and measures were chosen to fairly compare systems retrieving elements, ranges of elements, and arbitrary passages. The INEX 2007 Ad Hoc Track featured three tasks: For the Focused Task a ranked-list of non-overlapping results (elements or passages) was needed. For the Relevant in Context Task non-overlapping results (elements or passages) were returned grouped by the article from which they came. For the Best in Context Task a single starting point (element start tag or passage start) for each article was needed. We discuss the results for the three tasks, examine the relative effectiveness of element and passage retrieval. This is examined in the context of content only (CO, or Keyword) search as well as content and structure (CAS, or structured) search.