=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-1172/CLEF2006wn-WebCLEF-BalogEt2006a |storemode=property |title=Overview of WebCLEF 2006 |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1172/CLEF2006wn-WebCLEF-BalogEt2006a.pdf |volume=Vol-1172 |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/clef/BalogAKR06a }} ==Overview of WebCLEF 2006== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1172/CLEF2006wn-WebCLEF-BalogEt2006a.pdf
                     Overview of WebCLEF 2006
         Krisztian Balog1   Leif Azzopardi3     Jaap Kamps1,2     Maarten de Rijke1
                             1
                                ISLA, University of Amsterdam
                2
                  Archive and Information Studies, University of Amsterdam
                           kbalog,kamps,mdr@science.uva.nl
        3
          Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde
                           Leif.Azzopardi@cis.strath.ac.uk


                                             Abstract
     We report on the CLEF 2006 WebCLEF track devoted to crosslingual web retrieval.
     We provide details about the retrieval tasks, the used topic set, and the results of
     WebCLEF participants. WebCLEF 2006 used a stream of known-item topics consisting
     of: (i) manual topics (including a selection of WebCLEF 2005 topics, and a set of new
     topics) and (ii) automatically generated topics (generated using two techniques). Our
     main findings are the following. First, the results over all topics show that current
     CLIR systems are quite effective, retrieving on average the target page in the top
     few ranks. Second, when we break down the scores over the manually constructed
     and the generated topics, we see that the manually constructed topics result in higher
     performance. Third, the resulting scores on automatic topics give, at least, a solid
     indication of performance, and can hence be an attractive alternative in situations
     where manual topics are not readily available.

Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing; H.3.3 Infor-
mation Search and Retrieval; H.3.4 Systems and Software; H.3.7 Digital Libraries

General Terms
Measurement, Performance, Experimentation

Keywords
Web retrieval, Known-item retrieval, Multilingual retrieval


1    Introduction
The world wide web presents one of the greatest challenges for cross-language information re-
trieval [5]. Content on the world wide web is essentially multilingual, and web users are often
polyglots. The European web space is a case in point: the majority of European speak at least
one language other than their mother-tongue, and the Internet is a frequent reason to use a foreign
language [4]. The challenge of crosslingual web retrieval is addressed, head-on, by WebCLEF [9].
    The crosslingual web retrieval track uses an extensive collection of spidered web sites of Euro-
pean governments, baptized EuroGOV [7]. The retrieval task at WebCLEF 2006 is based on a
stream of known-item topics in a range of languages. This task, which is labeled mixed-monolingual
retrieval, was pioneered at the WebCLEF 2005 [8]. Participants of WebCLEF 2005 expressed the
wish to be able to iron out issues with the systems they built during last year’s campaign, since
for many it was their first attempt at web IR with lots of languages, encoding issues, different
formats, and noisy data. The continuation of this known-item retrieval task at WebCLEF 2006
allows veteran participants to take stock and make meaningful comparisons of their results over
years. To facilitate this, we decided to include a selection of WebCLEF 2005 topics in the topic set
(also available for training purposes), as well as a set of new known-item topics. Furthermore, we
decided to experiment with the automatic generation of known-item topics [2]. By contrasting the
human topics with the automatically generated topics, we hope to gain insight in the validity of the
automatically generated topics, especially in a multilingual environment. Our main findings are
the following. First, the results over all topics show that current CLIR systems are quite effective,
retrieving on average the target page in the top few ranks. Second, when we break down the scores
over the manually constructed and the generated topics, we see that the manually constructed
topics result in higher performance. Third, the resulting scores on automatic topics give, at least,
a solid indication of performance, and can hence be an attractive alternative in situations where
manual topics are not readily available.
    The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 gives the details of the method
for automatically generating known-item topics. Next, in Section 3, we discuss the details of the
track set-up: the retrieval task, document collection, and topics of request. Section 4 reports
the runs submitted by participants, and Section 5 discusses the results of the official submissions.
Finallly, in Section 6 we discuss our findings and draw some initial conclusions.


2     Automatic Topic Construction
This year we experimented with the automatic generation of known-item topics. The main ad-
vantage of automatically generating queries is that for any given test collection numerous queries
can be produced at minimal cost [2]. In the WebCLEF setting this could be especially rewarding,
since manual development of topics on all the different languages would require human resources
we do not dispose of.
    To create simulated queries, we model the following behavior of a known-item searcher. We
assume that the user wants to retrieve a particular document that they have seen before in the
collection, because some need has arisen calling for this document. The user then tries to re-
construct or recall terms, phrases and features that would help identify this document, which they
pose as a query.
    The basic algorithm we use for generating queries was introduced by Azzopardi and de Rijke [2],
and is based on an abstraction of the actual querying process, as follows:

    • Initialize an empty query q = {}
    • Select the document d to be the known-item with probability p(d)
    • Select the query length k with probability p(k)
    • Repeat k times:
        – Select a term t from the document model of d with probability p(t|θd )
        – Add t to the query q.
    • Record d and q to define the known-item/query pair.

By repeatedly performing this algorithm we can create many queries. Before doing so, the prob-
ability distributions p(d), p(k) and p(t|θd ) need to be defined. By using different probability
distributions we can characterize different types and styles of queries that a user may submit.
    Azzopardi and de Rijke [2] conducted experiments using various term sampling methods in
order to simulate different styles of queries. In one case, they set the probability of selecting
a term from the document model to a uniform distribution, where p(t|θd ) was set to zero for all
terms that did not occur in the document, whilst all other terms were assigned an equal probability.
                                                       Unigram
                                      0.9
          Query                                                                    Query
          Start                                                                    End
                                            0.1


                                                       Noise




                       Figure 1: The process of auto-uni query generation



                                                           0.7
                                             Unigram                 Next Term
                                                                                    Query
                          0.9
                                                               0.3                  End
          Query
          Start
                                0.1


                                              Noise




                        Figure 2: The process of auto-bi query generation




Compared to other types of queries, they found that using a uniform selection produced queries
which were the most similar to real queries.
    In the construction of a set of queries for the EuroGOV collection, we also use uniform
sampling, but include query noise and then phrase extraction into the process to create more
realistic queries. To include some noise to the process of generating a query, our model for sampling
query terms is broken into two parts: sampling from the document (in our case uniformly) and
sampling terms at random (i.e., noise). Figure 1 shows the sampling process; where a term is
drawn from the unigram document model with some probability λ, or it is drawn from the noise
model with probability 1 − λ . Consequently, as λ tends to zero, we assume that the user has
almost perfect recollection of the original document. Conversely, as λ tends to one, we assume
that the user’s memory of the document degrades to the point that they know the document exists
but they have no idea as to the terms other than randomly selecting terms (from the collection).
We used λ = 0.1 for topic generation. This model was used for our first setting, called auto-uni.
    We further extended the process of sampling terms from a document. Once a term has been
sampled from the document, we assume that there is some probability that the subsequent term
will be drawn. For instance given the sentence, “. . . Information Retrieval Agent . . . ”, if the
first term sampled is “Retrieval”, then the subsequent term selected will be “Agent”. This was
included to provide some notion of phrase extraction to the process of selecting query terms. The
process is depicted in Figure 2. This model was used for our second setting, called auto-bi, where
we either add the subsequent term with p = 0.7, or sample a new term independently from the
document with p = 0.3.
    We indexed each domain within the EuroGOV collection separately, using the Lemur language
modeling toolkit [6]. We experimented with two different styles of queries, and for each of them we
generated 30 queries per top level domain. For both settings, the query length k was selected using
a Poisson distribution where the mean was set to 3. Two restrictions were placed on sampled query
terms: (i) the size of a term needed to be greater than 3, and (ii) the terms should not contain
Table 1: Number of topics in the original topic set, and in the new topic set where we only retain
topics for which at least one of the participants retrieved the relevant page.

                       all    auto   auto-uni   auto-bi   manual     manual-o    manual-n
         original   1,940    1,620        810      810       320         195         125
         new        1,120      817        415      402       303         183         120
         deleted      820      803        395      408        17          12            5


any numeric characters. Finally, the document prior p(d) was also set to a uniform distribution.
   Our initial results motivate further work with more sophisticated query generators. A natural
next step would be to take structure and document priors into account.


3     The WebCLEF 2006 Tasks
3.1    Document Collection
For the purposes of the WebCLEF track the EuroGOV corpus was developed [7]. EuroGOV
is a crawl of European government-related sites, where collection building is less restricted by
intellectual property rights. It is a multilingual web corpus, which contains over 3.5 million pages
from 27 primary domains, covering over twenty languages. There is no single language that
dominates the corpus, and its linguistic diversity provides a natural setting for multilingual web
search.

3.2    Topics
The topic set for WebCLEF 2006 consists of a stream of 1,940 known-item topics, consisting of both
manual and automatically generated topics. As is shown in Table 1, 195 manual topics were reused
from WebCLEF 2005, and 125 new manual topics were constructed. For the generated topics, we
focused on 27 primary domains and generated 30 topics using the auto-uni query generation, and
another 30 topics using the auto-bi query generation (see Section 2 for details), amounting to 810
automatic topics for each of the methods.
    After the runs had been evaluated, we observed that the performance achieved on the automatic
topics are frequently very poor. We found that in several cases none of the participants found
any relevant page within the top 50 returned results. These are often mixed-language topics, a
result of language diversity within a primary domain, or they proved to be too hard for any other
reason.
    In our post-submission analysis we decided to zoom in on a subset of topics and removed any
topics that did not meet the following criterion: “whether any participant found the targetted
page within the top 50.” Table 1 presents the number of original, deleted and remaining topics.
820 out of the 1, 940 original topics were removed. Most of the removed topics are automatic
(803), but there are also a few manual ones (17). The remaining topic set contains 1,120 topics,
and is referred as the new topic set.
    We decided to re-evaluate the submitted runs using this new topic set. Since it is a subset of
the original topic collection, participants did not have to make any efforts. Submitted runs were
re-evaluated using a restricted version of the (original) qrels that correspond to the new topic set.

3.3    Retrieval Task
WebCLEF 2006 saw the continuation of the Mixed Monolingual task of WebCLEF 2005 [8]. The
mixed-monolingual task is meant to simulate a user searching for a known-item page in a Euro-
pean language. The mixed-monolingual task uses the title field of the topics to create a set of
monolingual known-item topics.
    Our emphasis this year is on the mixed monolingual task. The manual topics in the topic set
contain an English translation of the query. Hence, using only the manual topics, experiments
with a Multilingual task are possible. The multilingual task is meant to simulate a user looking
for a certain known-item page in a particular European language. The user, however, uses English
to formulate her query. The multilingual task used the English translations of the original topic
statements.

3.4    Submission
For each task, participating teams were allowed to submit up to 5 runs. The results had to
be submitted in TREC format. For each topic a ranked list of no more than 50 results should
be returned. For each topic at least 1 result must be returned. Participants were also asked
to provide a list of the metadata fields they used, and a brief description of the methods and
techniques employed.

3.5    Evaluation
The WebCLEF 2006 topics were known-item topics where a unique URL is targetted (unless there
are page-duplicates in the collection, or near duplicates). Hence, we opted for a precision measure.
The main metric used for evaluation was mean reciprocal rank (MRR). The reciprocal rank is,
indeed, calculated as 1 divided by the rank at which the (first) relevant page is found. The mean
reciprocal rank is obtained by, indeed, averaging the reciprocal ranks of a set of topics.


4     Submitted Runs
There were 8 participating teams that managed to submit official runs to WebCLEF 2006: buap;
depok; hildesheim; hummingbird; isla; reina; rfia; and ucm. For details of the respective retrieval
approaches to crosslingual web retrieval, we refer to the participants papers.
    Table 2 lists the runs submitted to WebCLEF 2006: 35 for the mixed-monolingual task, and 1
for the bilingual task. We also indicate the use of topic metadata, either the topic’s language (TL),
the targetted page’s language (PL), or the targetted page’s domain (PD). The mean reciprocal rank
(MRR) is reported over both the original and the new topic set. The official results of WebCLEF
2006 were based on the original topic set containing 1,940 topics. As detailed in Section 3.2 above,
we have pruned the topic set by removing topics for which none of the participants retrieved the
target page, resulting in 1,120 topics. In Appendix A, we provide scores for various breakdowns
for both the original topic set and the new topic set.
    The task description stated that for each topic, at least 1 result must be returned. However,
several runs did not fulfill this condition. The best results for each team were achieved using 1
or more metadata fields. Knowledge of the page’s primary domain (shown in the PD column in
Table 2) seemed moderately effective.


5     Results
This year our focus is on the Mixed-Monolingual task. A large number of topics were made
available, consisting old manual, new manual, and automatically generated topics. Evaluation
results showed that the performance achieved on the automatic topics are frequently very poor,
and we made a new topic set where we removed topics for which none of the participants found
any relevant page within the top 50 returned results. All the results presented in this section
correspond to the new topic set consisting of 1,120 topics.
Table 2: Summary of all runs submitted to WebCLEF 2006. The ‘metadata usage’ columns
indicate usage of topic metadata: topic language (TL), page language (PL), page domain (PD).
Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) scores are reported for both the original and the new topic set.
For each team, its best scoring non-metadata run is in italics, and its best scoring metadata run
is in boldface. Scores reported at the Multilingual section are based only on the manual topics.

                                                           Metadata usage          topics
  Group id                Run name                         TL PL PD          original     new

  Monolingual runs:
  buap                    allpt40bi                                    Y     0.0157    0.0272
  depok                   UI1DTA                           Y                  0.0404    0.0699
                          UI2DTF                           Y                 0.0918    0.1589
                          UI3DTAF                          Y                  0.0253    0.0439
                          UI4DTW                           Y                  0.0116    0.0202
  hildesheim              UHi1-5-10                                    Y      0.0718    0.1243
                          UHi510                                       Y      0.0718    0.1243
                          UHiBase                                      Y     0.0795    0.1376
                          UHiBrf1                                      Y      0.0677   0. 1173
                          UHiBrf2                                      Y      0.0676    0.1171
                          UHiTitle                                     Y      0.0724    0.1254
  hummingbird             humWC06                                             0.1133    0.1962
                          humWC06dp                                          0.1209    0.2092
                          humWC06dpc                                          0.1169    0.2023
                          humWC06dpcD                                  Y     0.1380    0.2390
                          humWC06p                                            0.1180    0.2044
  isla                    Baseline                                           0.1694    0.2933
                          Comb                                                0.1685    0.2918
                          CombMeta                                     Y      0.1947    0.3370
                          CombNboost                                   Y      0.1954    0.3384
                          CombPhrase                                   Y     0.2001    0.3464
  reina                   usal base                        Y                  0.0100    0.0174
                          usal mix                         Y                  0.0137    0.0237
                          USAL mix hp                      Y     Y           0.0139    0.0241
                          usal mix hp                      Y                  0.0139    0.0241
                          usal mix hp ok                   Y                  0.0139    0.0241
  rfia                    DPSinDiac                        Y           Y      0.0982    0.1700
                          ERConDiac                        Y           Y      0.1006    0.1742
                          ERFinal                          Y           Y     0.1021    0.1768
                          ERSinDiac                        Y           Y      0.1021    0.1768
  ucm                     webclef-run-all-2006             Y                 0.0870    0.1505
                          webclef-run-all-2006-def-ok      Y                  0.0870    0.1505
                          webclef-run-all-2006-def-ok-2    Y                  0.0870    0.1505
                          webclef-run-all-2006-ok-conref   Y                  0.0870    0.1505
                          webclef-run-all-OK-definitivo    Y                  0.0870    0.1505

  Multilingual runs:
  hildesheim              UHiMu                                              0.2553     0.2686
Table 3: Best overall results using the new topic set. The results are reported on all topics, the
automatic and manual subsets of topics, and average is calculated from the auto and manual
scores.
       Group id        Run                                  all     auto     manual     average
       isla            combPhrase                       0.3464    0.3145     0.4411      0.3778
       hummingbird     humWC06dpcD                      0.2390    0.1396     0.5068      0.3232
       depok           UI2DTF                           0.1589    0.0923     0.3386      0.2154
       rfia            ERFinal                          0.1768    0.1556     0.2431      0.1993
       hildesheim      UHiBase /5-10                    0.1376    0.0685     0.3299      0.1992
       ucm             webclef-run-all-2006-def-ok-2    0.1505    0.1103     0.2591      0.1847
       buap            allpt40bi                        0.0272    0.0080     0.0790      0.0435
       reina           USAL mix hp                      0.0241    0.0075     0.0689      0.0382

               Table 4: Best runs using the automatic topics in the new topic set.

                Group id        Run                       auto    auto-uni    auto-bi
                isla            combNboost              0.3145      0.3114     0.3176
                rfia            ERFinal                 0.1556      0.1568     0.1544
                hummingbird     humWC06dpcD             0.1396      0.1408     0.1384
                ucm             webclef-run-all-2006    0.1103      0.1128     0.1077
                depok           UI2DTF                  0.0923      0.1024     0.0819
                hildesheim      UHiBase                 0.0685      0.0640     0.0731
                buap            allpt40bi               0.0080      0.0061     0.0099
                reina           USAL mix hp             0.0075      0.0126     0.0022


5.1    Mixed-Monolingual
We look at each team’s best scoring run, independent of whether it was a baseline run or used
some of the topic metadata. Table 3 presents the scores of the participating teams. We report the
results over the whole new qrel set (all ), and over the automatic and manual subsets of topics.
What is striking is that the automatic topics proved to be more difficult than manual ones. This
may be due in part to the fact that the manual topics cover 11 languages, but the generated topics
cover all 27 domains in EuroGOV including the more difficult domains and languages. Another
important factor may be the imperfections in the generated topics. Apart from the lower scores,
the auto topics also dominate the manual topics in number. Therefore we also used the average of
the auto and manual scores for ranking participants. Defining an overall ranking of teams is not
straightforward, since one team may outperform another on the automatic topics, but perform
worse on the manual ones. Still, we observe that participants can be unambiguously assigned into
one out of three bins based on either the all or the average scores: the first bin consisting of
hummingbird and isla; the second bin of depok, hildesheim, rfia, and ucm; and the third bin of
buap and reina.

5.2    Evaluation on Automatic Topics
Automatic topics were generated using two different methods, as described in Section 2 above.
The participating teams’ scores did not show significant variance between the difficulty of topics,
using the the two generators. Table 4 provides details of the best runs when evaluation is restricted
to automatically generated topics only.
    Note that the scores included in Table 4 are measured on the new topic set. Notice, by the
way, that there is very little difference between the number of topics within the new topic set for
the two automatic topic subsets (auto-uni and auto-bi in Table 1).
    In general, the two query generation methods perform very similarly, and it is system specific
whether one type of automatic topics is preferred over the other. Our initial results with auto-
                          Table 5: Best manual runs using the new topic set.

             Group id          Run                              manual         old       new
             hummingbird       humWC06dpcD                      0.5068     0.4936     0.5269
             isla              combPhrase                        0.4411     0.3822   0.5310
             depok             UI2DTF                            0.3386     0.2783    0.4307
             hildesheim        UHi1-5-10                         0.3299     0.2717    0.4187
             ucm               webclef-run-all-2006-def-ok-2     0.2591     0.2133    0.3289
             rfia              DPSinDiac                         0.2431     0.1926    0.3201
             buap              allpt40bi                         0.0790     0.0863    0.0679
             reina             USAL mix hp                       0.0689     0.0822    0.0488


matically generated queries are promising, but still a large portion of these topics are not realistic.
This motivates us to work further on more advanced query generation methods.

5.3      Evaluation on Manual Topics
The manual topics include 183 old and 120 new queries. Old topics were randomly sampled from
last year’s topics, while new topics were developed by Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
and the track organizers. The new topics cover only languages for which expertise was available:
Dutch, English, German, Hungarian, and Spanish.
    In case of the old manual topics we witnessed improvements for all teams that took part in
WebCLEF 2005, compared to their last year’s scores. Moreover, we found that most participating
systems performed better on the new manual topics, compared to the old ones. A possible expla-
nation is the nature of the topics, namely the new topics may be more appropriate for know-item
search. Also, language coverage of the new manual topics could play a role.

5.4      Comparing Rankings
We use Kendall’s tau to determine correlations between the rankings of runs resulting from different
topic sets. First, we find weak (0.2–0.4) to moderate (0.4–0.6) positive correlations between ranking
of runs resulting from automatic topics, and rankings of runs resulting from manual topics, only
new manual topics, and only old manual topics; see Table 6. The rankings resulting from the topics
generated with the “auto-bi” method are somewhat more correlated with the manual rankings
than the ranking resulting from the topics generated with the “auto-uni” method. A very strong

                       Table 6: Kendall tau rank correlation, two-sided p-value.

                         all    auto    auto-uni   auto-bi     manual     manual-new    manual-old
   all             τ           0.8182    0.7726    0.8125      0.5935       0.6292       0.5707
                   p           0.0000    0.0000    0.0000      0.0000       0.0000       0.0000
   auto            τ                     0.9412    0.9688      0.4108       0.4575       0.3945
                   p                     0.0000    0.0000      0.0006       0.0001       0.0010
   auto-uni        τ                               0.9097      0.3717       0.4183       0.3619
                   p                               0.0000      0.0019       0.0005       0.0025
   auto-bi         τ                                           0.4029       0.4762       0.3800
                   p                                           0.0008       0.0000       0.0016
   manual          τ                                                        0.9123       0.9642
                   p                                                        0.0000       0.0000
   manual-new      τ                                                                     0.8769
                   p                                                                     0.0000
   manual-old      τ
                   p
positive correlation (0.8–1.0) is found between the ranking of runs obtained using new manual
topics and the ranking of runs resulting from using old manual topics. Note that the new topic
set we introduced does not affect the relative ranking of systems, thus the correlation scores we
reported here are exactly the same for the original and for the new topic sets.

5.5     Multilingual Runs
Our main focus this year was on the monolingual task, but we allowed submissions for multilingual
experiments within the mixed-monolingual setup. The manual topics (both old and new ones) are
provided with English titles. The automatically generated topics do not have English translations.
    We received only one multilingual submission, from the University of Hildesheim. The evalua-
tion of the multilingual run is restricted to the manual topics in the topic set, Table 2 summarizes
the results of that run. A detailed breakdown over the different topic types is provided in Ap-
pendix A (Tables 7 and 8)


6     Conclusion
The world-wide-web is a natural reflection of the language diversity in the world, both in terms
of web content as well as in terms of web users. Effective cross-language information retrieval
(CLIR) techniques have clear potential for improving the search experience of such users. The
WebCLEF track at CLEF 2006 attempts to realize some of this potential, by investigating known-
item retrieval in a multilingual setting. Known-item retrieval is a typical search task on the web [3].
This year’s track focused on mixed monolingual search, in which the topic set is a stream of known-
item topics in various languages. This task was pioneered at WebCLEF 2005 [8]. The collection is
based on the spidered content of web sites of European governments. This year’s topic set covered
all 27 primary domains in the collection, and contained both manually constructed search topics
and automatically generated topics. Our main findings for the mixed-monolingual task are the
following. First, the results over all topics show that current CLIR systems are quite effective.
These systems retrieve, on average, the target page in the top few ranks. This is particularly
impressive when considering that the topics of WebCLEF 2006 covered no less than 27 European
primary domains. Second, when we break down the scores over the manually constructed and the
generated topics, we see that the manually constructed topics result in higher performance. The
manual topics consisted of both a set of newly constructed topics, and a selection of WebCLEF
2005 topics. For veteran participants, we can compare the scores over years, and we see progress
for the old manual topics. The new manual topics (which were not available for training) seem to
confirm this progress.
    Building a cross-lingual test collection is a complex endeavor. Information retrieval evaluation
requires substantial manual effort by topic authors and relevance assessors. In a cross-lingual set-
ting this is particularly difficult, since the language capabilities of topic authors should sufficiently
reflect the linguistic diversity of the used document collection. Alternative proposals to traditional
topics and relevance assessments, such as term relevance sets, still require human effort (albeit only
a fraction) and linguistic capacities by the topic author.1 This prompted us to experiment with
techniques for automatically generating known-item search requests. The automatic construction
of known-item topics has been applied earlier in a monolingual setting [2]. At WebCLEF 2006, two
refined versions of the techniques were applied in a mixed-language setting. The general set-up
of the the WebCLEF 2006 track can be viewed as an experiment with automatically constructing
topics. Recall that the topic set contained both manual and automatic topics. This allows us to
critically evaluate the performance on the automatic topics with the manual topics, although the
comparison is not necessarily fair given that the manual and automatic subsets of topics differ
both in number and in the domains they cover. Our general conclusion on the automatic topics is
a mixed one: On the one hand, our results show that there are still some substantial differences
   1 Recall that term relevance sets (T-rels) consisting of a set of terms likely to occur in relevant documents, and

a set of irrelevant terms (especially disambiguation terms avoiding false-positives) [1].
between the automatic topics and manual topics, and it is clear that automatic topics cannot
simply substitute manual topics. Yet on the other hand, the resulting scores on automatic topics
give, at least, a solid indication of performance, and can hence be an attractive alternative in
situations where manual topics are not readily available.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) for providing ad-
ditional Spanish topics.
    Krisztian Balog was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
under project numbers 220-80-001, 600.065.120 and 612.000.106. Jaap Kamps was supported by
NWO under project numbers 612.066.302, 612.066.513, 639.072.601, and 640.001.501; and by the
E.U. IST programme of the 6th FP for RTD under project MultiMATCH contract IST-033104.
Maarten de Rijke was supported by NWO under project numbers 017.001.190, 220-80-001, 264-70-
050, 354-20-005, 600.065.120, 612-13-001, 612.000.106, 612.066.302, 612.069.006, 640.001.501, 640.-
002.501, and and by the E.U. IST programme of the 6th FP for RTD under project MultiMATCH
contract IST-033104.


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[6] Lemur. The Lemur toolkit for language modeling and information retrieval, 2005. URL:
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[7] B. Sigurbjörnsson, J. Kamps, and M. de Rijke. EuroGOV: Engineering a multilingual Web
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A     Breakdown of Scores over Topic Types
We provide a breakdown of scores over the different topic types, both for the original topic set in
Table 7 and for the new topic set in Table 8.
Table 7: Original topic set: breakdown of submission results over topic types (MRR) for all runs
submitted to WebCLEF 2006. For each team, its best scoring run is in boldface.

 RUN                               ALL                AUTO                          MANUAL
                                  topics        all     uni          bi       all      old       new

 buap
 allpt40bi                        0.0157    0.0040    0.0031    0.0049    0.0750    0.0810    0.0657

 depok
 UI1DTA                            0.0404    0.0234    0.0296    0.0173    0.1263    0.1099    0.1522
 UI2DTF                           0.0918    0.0466    0.0525    0.0406    0.3216    0.2611    0.4168
 UI3DTAF                           0.0253    0.0142    0.0116    0.0168    0.0819    0.0644    0.1094
 UI4DTW                            0.0116    0.0025    0.0020    0.0030    0.0583    0.0284    0.1053

 hildesheim
 UHi1-5-10                         0.0718    0.0242    0.0231    0.0253   0.3134     0.2550   0.4051
 UHi510                            0.0718    0.0242    0.0231    0.0253   0.3134     0.2550   0.4051
 UHiBase                          0.0795    0.0346    0.0328    0.0363     0.3076   0.2556     0.3893
 UHiBrf1                           0.0677    0.0220    0.0189    0.0251    0.3000    0.2485    0.3812
 UHiBrf2                           0.0676    0.0221    0.0188    0.0253    0.2989    0.2464    0.3816
 UHiTitle                          0.0724    0.0264    0.0245    0.0283    0.3061    0.2542    0.3876
 UHiMu (multilingual)              0.0489    0.0083    0.0063    0.0102    0.2553    0.2146    0.3192

 hummingbird
 humWC06                           0.1133    0.0530    0.0572    0.0488    0.4194    0.3901    0.4657
 humWC06dp                         0.1209    0.0528    0.0555    0.0501    0.4664    0.4471    0.4967
 humWC06dpc                        0.1169    0.0472    0.0481    0.0464    0.4703    0.4553    0.4939
 humWC06dpcD                      0.1380    0.0704    0.0721    0.0687    0.4814    0.4633    0.5099
 humWC06p                          0.1180    0.0519    0.0556    0.0482    0.4538    0.4252    0.4988

 isla
 baseline                          0.1694    0.1253    0.1397    0.1110    0.3934    0.3391    0.4787
 comb                              0.1685    0.1208    0.1394    0.1021    0.4112    0.3578    0.4952
 combmeta                          0.1947    0.1505   0.1670     0.1341    0.4188   0.3603     0.5108
 combNboost                        0.1954   0.1586     0.1595   0.1576     0.3826    0.3148    0.4891
 combPhrase                       0.2001     0.1570    0.1639    0.1500   0.4190     0.3587   0.5138

 reina
 usal base                         0.0100    0.0028    0.0044    0.0011    0.0468    0.0550    0.0340
 usal mix                          0.0137    0.0038    0.0065    0.0011    0.0640    0.0747    0.0472
 USAL mix hp                      0.0139    0.0038    0.0065    0.0011    0.0655    0.0771    0.0472
 usal mix hp                       0.0139    0.0038    0.0065    0.0011    0.0655    0.0771    0.0472
 usal mix hp ok                    0.0139    0.0038    0.0065    0.0011    0.0655    0.0771    0.0472

 rfia
 DPSinDiac                         0.0982    0.0721    0.0736    0.0706   0.2309    0.1808     0.3098
 ERConDiac                         0.1006    0.0771    0.0795    0.0746    0.2203    0.1693    0.3006
 ERFinal                          0.1021    0.0785    0.0803    0.0766     0.2220    0.1635   0.3140
 ERSinDiac                        0.1021    0.0785    0.0803    0.0766     0.2220    0.1635   0.3140

 ucm
 webclef-run-all-2006-def-ok-2    0.0870    0.0556    0.0578    0.0534    0.2461    0.2002    0.3183
 webclef-run-all-2006-def-ok       0.0870    0.0556    0.0578    0.0534    0.2461    0.2002    0.3183
 webclef-run-all-2006-ok-conref    0.0870    0.0556    0.0578    0.0534    0.2461    0.2002    0.3183
 webclef-run-all-2006              0.0870    0.0556    0.0578    0.0534    0.2461    0.2002    0.3183
 webclef-run-all-OK-definitivo     0.0870    0.0556    0.0578    0.0534    0.2461    0.2002    0.3183
Table 8: New topic set: breakdown of submission results over topic types (MRR) for all runs
submitted to WebCLEF 2006. For each team, its best scoring run is in boldface.

 RUN                               ALL                AUTO                          MANUAL
                                  topics        all     uni          bi       all      old       new

 buap
 allpt40bi                        0.0272    0.0080    0.0061    0.0099    0.0790    0.0863    0.0679

 depok
 UI1DTA                            0.0699    0.0465    0.0578    0.0348    0.1330    0.1171    0.1572
 UI2DTF                           0.1589    0.0923    0.1024    0.0819    0.3386    0.2783    0.4307
 UI3DTAF                           0.0439    0.0281    0.0226    0.0339    0.0862    0.0686    0.1130
 UI4DTW                            0.0202    0.0049    0.0038    0.0060    0.0613    0.0302    0.1088

 hildesheim
 UHi1-5-10                         0.1243    0.0480    0.0451    0.0510   0.3299     0.2717   0.4187
 UHi510                            0.1243    0.0480    0.0451    0.0510   0.3299     0.2717   0.4187
 UHiBase                          0.1376    0.0685    0.0640    0.0731     0.3238   0.2724     0.4023
 UHiBrf1                           0.1173    0.0436    0.0369    0.0505    0.3159    0.2648    0.3939
 UHiBrf2                           0.1171    0.0438    0.0367    0.0510    0.3147    0.2625    0.3943
 UHiTitle                          0.1254    0.0524    0.0479    0.0570    0.3222    0.2709    0.4005
 UHiMu (multilingual )             0.0846    0.0164    0.0124    0.0205    0.2686    0.2286    0.3297

 hummingbird
 humWC06                           0.1962    0.1051    0.1116    0.0984    0.4416    0.4156    0.4812
 humWC06dp                         0.2092    0.1047    0.1084    0.1009    0.4910    0.4764    0.5132
 humWC06dpc                        0.2023    0.0937    0.0939    0.0935    0.4952    0.4852    0.5104
 humWC06dpcD                      0.2390    0.1396    0.1408    0.1384    0.5068    0.4936    0.5269
 humWC06p                          0.2044    0.1030    0.1086    0.0971    0.4777    0.4530    0.5154

 isla
 baseline                          0.2933    0.2485    0.2726    0.2237    0.4141    0.3614    0.4946
 comb                              0.2918    0.2394    0.2720    0.2058    0.4329    0.3812    0.5117
 combmeta                          0.3370    0.2985   0.3259     0.2701    0.4409   0.3839     0.5278
 combNboost                        0.3384   0.3145     0.3114   0.3176     0.4028    0.3355    0.5054
 combPhrase                       0.3464     0.3112    0.3199    0.3023   0.4411     0.3822   0.5310

 reina
 usal base                         0.0174    0.0055    0.0087   0.0023     0.0493    0.0586    0.0351
 usal mix                          0.0237    0.0075    0.0126    0.0022    0.0674    0.0796    0.0488
 USAL mix hp                      0.0241    0.0075    0.0126     0.0022   0.0689    0.0822    0.0488
 usal mix hp                       0.0241    0.0075    0.0126    0.0022    0.0689    0.0822    0.0488
 usal mix hp ok                    0.0241    0.0075    0.0126    0.0022    0.0689    0.0822    0.0488

 rfia
 DPSinDiac                         0.1700    0.1429    0.1436    0.1422   0.2431    0.1926     0.3201
 ERConDiac                         0.1742    0.1528    0.1552    0.1503    0.2320    0.1804    0.3106
 ERFinal                          0.1768    0.1556    0.1568    0.1544     0.2337    0.1743   0.3244
 ERSinDiac                        0.1768    0.1556    0.1568    0.1544     0.2337    0.1743   0.3244

 ucm
 webclef-run-all-2006-def-ok-2    0.1505    0.1103    0.1128    0.1077    0.2591    0.2133    0.3289
 webclef-run-all-2006-def-ok       0.1505    0.1103    0.1128    0.1077    0.2591    0.2133    0.3289
 webclef-run-all-2006-ok-conref    0.1505    0.1103    0.1128    0.1077    0.2591    0.2133    0.3289
 webclef-run-all-2006              0.1505    0.1103    0.1128    0.1077    0.2591    0.2133    0.3289
 webclef-run-all-OK-definitivo     0.1505    0.1103    0.1128    0.1077    0.2591    0.2133    0.3289