WANTED: Focused Queries for Focused Retrieval

Abstract

Focused retrieval tasks such as XML or passage retrieval strive to provide direct access to the relevant content of a document. In these scenarios users can pose focused queries, i.e., queries that restrict the type of output the user wants to see. We first analyze several characteristics of this type of requests and show that they differ substantially from the unfocused ones. We also show that typical XML retrieval systems tend to perform poorly on focused queries and that systems ranking differs considerably when processing each of the types. Finally, we argue that the unbalanced number of focused queries in the INEX benchmark topic set might lead to misleading interpretations of the evaluation results. To get a better insight of the systems ability to perform focused search, more focused queries are needed.