SIGIR 2004 workshop

Current statistical approaches to IR have shown themselves to be effective and reliable in both research and commercial settings. However, experimental environments such as TREC show that retrieval results vary widely according to both topic (question asked) and system. This is true for both the basic IR systems and for any of the more advanced implementations using, for example, query expansion. Some retrieval approaches work well on one topic but poorly on a second, while other approaches may work poorly on the first topic, but succeed on the second. If it could be determined in advance which approach would work well, then a guided approach could strongly improve performance. Unfortunately, despite many efforts no one knows how to choose good approaches on a per topic basis.