Large scale testing of a descriptive phrase finder

This paper describes an evaluation of an existing technique that locates sentences containing descriptions of a query word or phrase. The experiments expand on previous tests by exploring the effectiveness of the system when searching from a much larger document collection. The results showed the system working significantly better than when searching over smaller collections. The improvement was such, that a more stringent definition of what constituted a correct description was devised to better measure effectiveness. The results also pointed to potentially new forms of evidence that might be used in improving the location process.