=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1178/CLEF2012wn-CHiC-SchaerEt2012
|storemode=property
|title=Dealing with Sparse Document and Topic Representations: Lab Report for CHiC 2012
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1178/CLEF2012wn-CHiC-SchaerEt2012.pdf
|volume=Vol-1178
}}
==Dealing with Sparse Document and Topic Representations: Lab Report for CHiC 2012==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1178/CLEF2012wn-CHiC-SchaerEt2012.pdf
Dealing with Sparse Document and Topic
Representations: Lab Report for CHiC 2012
Philipp Schaer, Daniel Hienert, Frank Sawitzki,
Andias Wira-Alam, Thomas Lüke
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences,
Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany
firstname.lastname@gesis.org
Abstract. We will report on the participation of GESIS at the first CHiC work-
shop (Cultural Heritage in CLEF). Being held for the first time, no prior experi-
ence with the new data set, a document dump of Europeana with ca. 23 million
documents, exists. The most prominent issues that arose from pretests with this
test collection were the very unspecific topics and sparse document representa-
tions. Only half of the topics (26/50) contained a description and the titles were
usually short with just around two words. Therefore we focused on three differ-
ent term suggestion and query expansion mechanisms to surpass the sparse top-
ical description. We used two methods that build on concept extraction from
Wikipedia and on a method that applied co-occurrence statistics on the availa-
ble Europeana corpus. In the following paper we will present the approaches
and preliminary results from their assessments.
Keywords: Evaluation, Information Retrieval, Cultural Heritage, Query Expan-
sion, Entity Extraction, Co-occurrence Analysis, Wikipedia.
1 Introduction
In 2011 the CHiC workshop (Cultural Heritage in CLEF) was held for the first time at
CLEF. After this initial workshop, where first ideas on how to evaluate the retrieval
of “cultural assets” were discussed, CHiC started as a pilot evaluation lab in 2012.
Therefore we neither had prior experience with the data set that was provided by the
lab organizers nor with the specific domain (cultural heritage) in particular. To allow
a systematic IR evaluation the organizers published a dump from the Europeana plat-
form with roughly 23 million documents to form the initial evaluation corpus and a
total of 50 different topics that were used in three different tasks. GESIS contributed
in two of these tasks: the Ad-hoc Retrieval Task and the Semantic Enrichment Task.
In the following paper we will present our approaches and preliminary results from
their assessments.
Since this lab had no predecessor we couldn’t learn from previous results and best
practices. So, the main objective of this initial participation was to establish the re-
trieval environment, to get a feeling for the data set and to surpass the obvious issues
in the first place.
Table 1. Word counts for the English Ad-hoc Retrieval Task (ADHOC) and the Semantic
Enrichment Task (SE). Given are the mean, median, min and max counts for the description
and the title field in the topic file. The ad-hoc used 50 topics (CHIC-001 to CHIC-050) and the
semantic enrichment used 25 topics (CHIC-001 to CHIC-025).
task field mean median min max
ADHOC description 2,84 0 0 25
ADHOC title 1,94 2 1 6
SE description 1,56 0 0 13
SE title 1,91 2 1 3
The 50 topics provided were very unspecific and underspecified. They consist of
the usual identifier, title and description and were provided in three languages (Eng-
lish, French, and German). Only half of them (26/50) contained a description and the
titles were usually short with just around two words (see Table 1). As stated by the
official lab guideline, the topics “are taken from real Europeana query logs and com-
prise queries for people, places, work titles (e.g. Mona Lisa), events or subjects”. This
might explain the sparse representation of the topics, but it never the less is a source
of serious retrieval issues that led to the main objectives of our experiments.
When using unprocessed queries on all available metadata fields some topics just
produced very small result sets, e.g. topic CHIC-009 (“falkland islands”) only re-
turned 12 documents at all. So, we decided to focus on the Semantic Enrichment Task
to acquire a rich set of additional query terms that can be used for the necessary query
expansion mechanisms in the Ad-hoc Retrieval Task.
In the following paper we will first present our overall technical retrieval system,
different filters, and modifiers we used to access the raw data. We will then continue
by outlining three different approaches to find appropriate terms for our query expan-
sion. We will conclude with a discussion of the performance of the different ap-
proaches and the first lessons learned.
2 Indexing and Pre-processing the Europeana Dump
We choose the open-source search framework Solr1 to index and query the Europeana
dump provided by the CHiC organizers. Within Solr it is easy to import the XML data
for the evaluation without extensive schema conversions. A main idea behind using
Solr in a stand-alone configuration was that the original Europeana platform also uses
this technology stack. At GESIS we have made good experiences with Solr in a num-
ber of projects like the social science information portal Sowiport2. We used the Solr
4 nightly build (build no. 4.0-2012-05-29_08-19-37) for indexing and querying. At
the time of the evaluation it was not a stable release but it offered some benefits, like
included information analyzers that we used in the evaluation.
1
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
2
http://www.gesis.org/sowiport/en/home/overview.html
2.1 Solr Configuration
To keep the configuration and schema simple, we used the original Solr configuration
and imported the Europeana dump via dynamic fields into the provided schema.xml.
Using dynamic fields we stored the information as they are delivered in strings and
also for each language in a language based field type. The fieldnames remained as in
the original description. For English language information we used the available
"text_en" field type, for German language information the "text_de" fieldtype.
The available language specific field types in Solr 4 offer the following analyzers3
for all languages:
StandardTokenizerFactory: A general purpose tokenizer, which divides a string
into tokens with various types.
StopFilterFactory: Words from the Solr included stopword lists are discarded.
LowerCaseFilterFactory: All letters are indexed and queried as lowercase.
Additionally, language specific analyzers4 were used, for English and German:
EnglishPossessiveFilterFactory,
PorterStemFilterFactory: A stemmer for English,
GermanNormalizationFilterFactory,
GermanLightStemFilterFactory: A stemmer for German.
With the use of a copyField we stored all separate field information in a common
search field (chic-all).
2.2 Frequencies of Europeana Metadata Fields
After indexing the Europeana information in Solr, we were able to create an overview
about the coverage of different fields for English and German (see Table 2). We see
that the “europeana” namespace is nearly completely available for all datasets. The
basic namespace, that includes many available information is the Dublin Core (“dc”)
namespace. After that follows the “enrichment” namespace and rarely filled are fields
from the “dcterms” namespace. In our evaluation we will concentrate our queries to
data fields that are mostly available.
3 Acquiring Related Concepts
We introduce three different techniques to acquire related concepts that would later be
used to allow a query expansion. We tried to find related concepts in Wikipedia out-
links from the lead section (Section 3.1), from the Wikipedia full text using document
similaritiy (Section 3.2) and the Europeana corpus itself using co-occurrence analyses
(Section 3.3).
3
https://wiki.apache.org/solr/AnalyzersTokenizersTokenFilters
4
https://wiki.apache.org/solr/LanguageAnalysis
Table 2. Overview on the coverage of data fields in the Europeana dump used for CHIC. The
second and fourth columns indicate the percentage coverage of each field. So, in 14% of all
documents the dc:contributor field contained some data, while the europeana:country field was
filled in every document.
Field name % Field name (continued) %
dc:contributor 14 dcterms:tableOfContents 0
dc:coverage 30 dcterms:temporal 4
dc:creator 57 enrichment:agent_label 0
dc:date 50 enrichment:agent_term 0
dc:description 61 enrichment:concept_broader_label 35
dc:format 56 enrichment:concept_broader_term 35
dc:identifier 98 enrichment:concept_label 37
dc:language 42 enrichment:concept_term 37
dc:publisher 34 enrichment:period_broader_label 45
dc:relation 43 enrichment:period_broader_term 45
dc:rights 62 enrichment:period_label 45
dc:source 68 enrichment:period_term 45
dc:subject 50 enrichment:place_broader_label 10
dc:title 98 enrichment:place_broader_term 10
dc:type 88 enrichment:place_label 13
dcterms:alternative 3 enrichment:place_term 13
dcterms:created 22 europeana:country 100
dcterms:extent 22 europeana:dataProvider 78
dcterms:hasFormat 2 europeana:isShownAt 99
dcterms:hasPart 0 europeana:isShownBy 51
dcterms:hasVersion 16 europeana:language 100
dcterms:isPartOf 15 europeana:object 97
dcterms:isReferencedBy 0 europeana:provider 100
dcterms:issued 1 europeana:rights 60
dcterms:medium 13 europeana:type 100
dcterms:provenance 7 europeana:uri 100
dcterms:references 0 europeana:year 47
dcterms:spatia 0
3.1 Extracting Concepts from Wikipedia Lead Sections
In this approach we use related concepts from Wikipedia summaries to semantically
enrich CHIC topics. Wikipedia articles represent important concepts of the world
knowledge. If we can find a Wikipedia article that represents the topic, we can use the
text of the article to extract important concepts that are related to it. In this implemen-
tation we used links from the lead section, which summarizes the whole article with
the most important aspects. Wikipedia guidelines for the lead section 5 suggest: “The
lead should be able to stand alone as a concise overview. It should define the topic,
establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important
points […]”. Therefore it could be well-suited to find nearby related concepts. Links
in the summary represent relations to other important concepts existing in Wikipedia,
which we use for the semantic enrichment.
The approach therefore consists of two steps: (1) finding an appropriate Wikipedia
article that represents the topic and (2) extracting links from the article’s first para-
graph as a representation of important concepts.
For the first step, we have created a SOLR index of all titles of Wikipedia articles.
In several iterations we search for the topic with the (a) original topic, (b) the topic
excluding stop words, (c) the permutation of topic words and (d) individual words
from the topic. The title with the highest TF*IDF score is then used as a representa-
tion. For nearly all topics we were able to find a Wikipedia article that represents it.
Problems occur with concepts not contained in Wikipedia (like topic CHIC-049
“teufelstal”), very broad topics (like topic CHIC-020 “europa maps 1914”) or topics
that must be searched not only by the title, but in the full text (topic CHIC-037 “1809
combat”)
In the next step we extracted all links from the summary of the article. Therefore,
we first took the original WikiSyntax from the article through the Wikipedia API.
Then, we clean the article text from internal/system links and other sections like info
boxes. As a next step, we extract the summary above the first header. Links from this
section are then extracted with regular expressions, utilizing the fact that they are
marked with double square brackets. If we do not get enough links from this, we use
the whole article text, for example for very short articles. The extracted links are then
used as semantic enrichments for the original topic.
3.2 Extracting Concepts from Wikipedia Full Texts using Document
Similarity
In this second approach we use Wikipedia full texts to extract related concepts. For
our training corpus we use a particular subset of Wikipedia. In contrast to the previ-
ous approach we map Wikipedia entries of the given terms manually.
We used two different Wikipedia training corpora to enrich the query terms. The
first corpus is the German Wikipedia corpus that consists of 1,054,842 articles. The
articles are here randomly selected and the corpus comprises almost the half of the
5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28lead_section%29
complete German Wikipedia corpus6. The second corpus contains only articles having
backlinks or outlinks to the particular English Wikipedia entries taken from the 50
CHIC query terms. We extracted the back- and outlinks using the RelExAPI tool7
(also used [5]). This is based on the assumption that all articles linked to the source
article are somehow related, therefore it will help later to find the related terms. Over-
all, we have extracted 85,847 articles of the English Wikipedia. Finally, we crawl
each article page, extract the page contents, strip the HTML tags, and store them into
individual text files for the training corpus.
As an initial step, we index each training corpus using Lucene 8. Since each term is
represented as an article, given a query term, the related terms are the articles that are
most similar to the source. Therefore, this task can also be seen as finding related
documents. Formally, we define the similarity score of two documents, denoted as d1
and d2, as follows
( ) | |
where d1 and d2 are vectors of words with cardinality of n. We set a factor n to denote
the number of important words included in the calculation. The importance of a word
can be obtained by calculating its TF*IDF score. This method is a slight modification
of the Jaccard similarity coefficient.
3.3 Extracting Concepts from Europeana using Co-occurrence Analyses
A common approach to find related concepts is the use of co-occurrence analysis. It is
presented extensively in standard natural language processing handbooks e.g. the one
by Manning and Schütze [2]. Co-occurring elements are such elements that are likely
to occur in the same context. To increase retrieval performance we extracted those
terms from the dataset that are most likely to co-occur with the terms of a given topic.
This approach was implemented and used by us in other query expansion scenarios
[1, 4] and the general idea was presented as the so-called Search Term Recommender
by Petras [3], although the original concept based on controlled vocabularies.
In order to specify which terms are likely to co-occur a similarity measure has to
be defined. In our approach we choose the Jaccard Index which is calculated for two
attributes x and y where DSx and DSy are two document sets with DSx containing
documents with attribute x and DSy with attribute y, respectively. DSxy is the docu-
ments set containing attributes x and y (i.e. the intersection of DSx and DSy). The
document frequencies dfx, dfy and the collocation frequency dfxy are defined as the
size of DSx, DSy and DSxy. The Jaccard similarity is given in the next equation.
| | df
( )
| | df df df
6
As of June 3, 2012, the German Wikipedia had 2,398,859 articles.
7
http://multiweb.gesis.org/RelExAPI
8
http://lucene.apache.org/
To cope with large differences in the size of DSx and DSy we modified the index by
taking the logarithm.
With this measure we processed the following attributes from the Europeana cor-
pus. Terms appearing in dc:title and/or dc:description were treated as input (i.e. query
terms) and their co-occurrence with terms from the fields dc:subject and enrich-
ment:concept_label was measured using the Jaccard Index. To make the process easi-
er to understand let us look at the following example. Topic CHIC-010 consists of the
query “film canada”. Therefore, we measured which concepts from dc:subject and
enrichment:concept_label co-occurred the most with the terms “film” and “Canada”
in title or description. The resulting top 3 concepts are: “poster”, “Cinema and Thea-
tre”, and “popular media”. These concepts appear to be semantically related to the
query. However, it also becomes clear that the quality of the related concepts can only
be as good as the quality of the vocabulary used in dc:subject and enrich-
ment:concept_label.
4 Result Set Construction for the Ad-hoc and Semantic
Enrichment task
Each method listed in Section 3 returned a list of ten concepts that we used as the
result sets for the Semantic Enrichment Task and to establish a rudimentary query
expansion mechanism for the Ad-hoc Retrieval Task. Using the previously described
methods we established the following concept extraction services (the abbreviations
are the same used for the names of the runs and in the DIRECT system):
WIKI_ENTITY – Concepts from the Wikipedia lead section, extracted by detect-
ing outlinks (Section 3.1).
WIKI_SIM – Concepts from the Wikipedia full text, extracted from the German
Wikipedia subset (1 million documents) using document similaritiy (Section 3.2).
WIKI_BACK – Concepts from the Wikipedia full text, extracted from a Wikipedia
subset using document similarities. This subset consists of all back- and outlinks of
a given seed document (Section 3.2).
STR – Concepts from the Europeana data set, extracted using co-occurrence anal-
yses. The analyses were language dependent, so only the specific language corpus
was used (Section 3.3).
COMBO – A mixture of all available concepts from the four previous services
The result sets for the Semantic Enrichment task were constructed from the top 10
ranked results from the previously described approaches. While the co-occurrence and
Wikipedia document similarity approaches returned a ranked list based on the similar-
ity scores, the Wikipedia concept extraction from the lead sections did not include
such a score. We used the implicit ranking due to order of their appearance in the text.
We suppose that the earlier a linked concept appears in the summary the more im-
portant is has to be.
The query construction for the Ad-hoc Retrieval Task was done by taking the orig-
inal title, removing stopwords and adding the concepts by OR-ing them with the title
Table 3. Overview on the different methods that were used for the two monolingual Ad-hoc
tasks and the two monolingual Semantic Enrichment tasks. The WIKI_SIM system was only
used for the first 25 topics in the ADHOC-DE-DE task, since the other topics couldn’t be gen-
erated by the system on time.
ADHOC-EN-EN ADHOC-DE-DE SE-EN-EN SE-DE-DE
WIKI_ENTITY
WIKI_SIM - /-
WIKI_BACK - -
STR
COMBO - -
terms. We boosted the title term by factor 2 (^2) and searched in all available metada-
ta fields in the current language (chic-all, see Section 2). The expanded query for
topic CHIC-012 (“moby dick”) and the concepts gained from the Wikipedia lead
sections therefore looks like the following example:
chic_all-en:(moby OR dick)^2 OR chic_all-en:("Herman Mel-
ville" OR "English language" OR "Adventure novel" OR "Sea
story" OR "Richard Bentley" OR "Harper Brothers" OR "Her-
man Melville" OR "The Great American Novel" OR "litera-
ture" OR "Ishmael (Moby-Dick)")
The systems and concepts used for the expansion are identical to the ones from the
Semantic Enrichment Task. Additionally a combination of all concepts was submitted
(combo). The different combinations and systems used for each tasks and the results
we submitted for the Ad-hoc Retrieval and the Semantic Enrichtment Task are listed
in Table 3. All queries are stemmed and pre-processed at query time by the Solr filters
that are listed and described in Section 2.
5 Results
In the following section we report on the results from the different implementations
presented in the previous sections. As we participated in two tasks we will present the
results according to each task. A summary of the results is given in Table 4 and 5.
Due to a problem in the DIRECT evaluation system we could not access all data. The
figures are based on our own calculations using trec_eval, while the tables are based
on the data included in the figures provided by DIRECT.
5.1 Ad-hoc Retrieval Task
Out of the eight system runs we submitted the WIKI implementations could generally
produce the most effective results that were above the average performance of all
competing systems (AVG_ALL) which was 0.4255 for the English sub-task and
0.5111 for the German. The WIKI_ENTITY system was the best among our systems
with MAP value of 0.4396 (EN) and 0.5680 (DE). In both cases the WIKI_ENTITY
was among the top 5 participating systems.
In the English sub-task 14-15 topics didn’t returned any documents which resulted
in an empty result set and a MAP value of 0. In the German sub-task only 4-6 topics
had this problem. Some other topics nearly produced the same MAP value (like
CHIC-001, CHIC-006, CHIC-014 or CHIC-034) which might be seen as an indicator
that the terms used to expand the query didn’t have any effect.
COMBO_EN STR_EN WIKI_BACK_EN WIKI_ENTITY_EN
1,0
0,9
0,8
0,7
0,6
0,5
0,4
0,3
0,2
0,1
0,0
CHIC-001
CHIC-003
CHIC-005
CHIC-007
CHIC-009
CHIC-011
CHIC-013
CHIC-015
CHIC-017
CHIC-019
CHIC-021
CHIC-023
CHIC-025
CHIC-027
CHIC-029
CHIC-031
CHIC-033
CHIC-035
CHIC-037
CHIC-039
CHIC-041
CHIC-043
CHIC-045
CHIC-047
CHIC-049
COMBO_DE STR_DE WIKI_ENTITY_DE WIKI_SIM_DE
1,0
0,9
0,8
0,7
0,6
0,5
0,4
0,3
0,2
0,1
0,0
CHIC-001
CHIC-003
CHIC-005
CHIC-007
CHIC-009
CHIC-011
CHIC-013
CHIC-015
CHIC-017
CHIC-019
CHIC-021
CHIC-023
CHIC-025
CHIC-027
CHIC-029
CHIC-031
CHIC-033
CHIC-035
CHIC-037
CHIC-039
CHIC-041
CHIC-043
CHIC-045
CHIC-047
CHIC-049
Fig. 1. Plot of MAP values for the English and German monolingual Ad-hoc Retrieval Task.
Table 4. Results of the assessment for the Ad-hoc Task. We report on mean average precision
(MAP) and R-Precision (R-P) of each system for each language. Additionally the average val-
ues of all systems that participated in the task is reported (AVG_ALL).
System MAP (EN) R-P (EN) MAP (DE) R-P (DE)
WIKI_ENTITY 0.4396 0.4380 0.5680 0.5362
WIKI_BACK 0.4271 0.4116 - -
WIKI_SIM - - 0.5246 0.5190
STR 0.3728 0.3625 0.4806 0.4764
COMBO 0.3944 0.3887 0.5081 0.5040
AVG_ALL 0.4255 0.4175 0.5111 0.5036
Table 5. Results of the assessment for the Semantic Enrichment Task for the systems
WIKI_ENTITY, WIKI_BACK, WIKI_SIM, and STR. Additionally the average precision of all
systems that participated in the task is reported (AVG_ALL). Strong precision (P-strong) is the
average precision (over 25 queries) of "relevant" suggestions over all suggestions. Weak preci-
sion (P-weak) is the average precision (over 25 queries) of "relevant" and "maybe relevant"
over all suggestions.
System P-weak (EN) P- strong (EN) P-weak (DE) P strong (DE)
WIKI_ENTITY 0.9240 0.7000 0.8794 0.7448
WIKI_BACK 0.6440 0.5200 - -
WIKI_SIM 0.6320 0.5080 0.1160 0.0840
STR 0.1800 0.1000 0.1760 0.0960
AVG_ALL 0.6834 0.5470 0.6045 0.4721
5.2 Semantic Enrichment Task
Out of the seven runs that we submitted to the Semantic Enrichment task, the
WIKI_ENTITY implementation could outperform both our own and the competing
implementations from other groups. In the manual assessment this approach could
achieve a precision of 0.9240 (weak)/0.7000 (strong) in the English monolingual run,
and 0.8794 (weak), 0.7448 (strong) in the German monolingual run (see Table 5). All
other implementations were below the average precision over all runs. While for the
English run the other both WIKI systems could achieve precision values that were
only slightly below the average, the STR system could only provide useful enrich-
ments in 1/5 (weak) or 1/10 (strong) of the cases.
When evaluated as a Query Expansion mechanism by the CHiC organizers, the
WIKI_ENTITIY system was still among the top 5 systems with MAP values of
0.2338 (EN) and 0.3192 (DE). Surprisingly the reference implementation
ORIGINALQUERIESEN by the organizers was the best systems with MAP of
0.3411 (EN) and 0.5701 (DE). Our system outperformed the others in topics CHIC-
001 and CHIC-017, while it was significantly worse in CHIC-005. Since the imple-
mentation details are not clear9, we cannot describe this any further.
6 Discussion
In this paper we described three different approaches that were implemented in five
different systems (see Table 3).
For both Wikipedia methods the mapping of the topic title to a Wikipedia docu-
ment were an essential first step. We surpassed this by using a rather ad-hoc imple-
mentation using a separate Solr index (WIKI_ENTITY) or by mapping them by hand
(WIKI_SIM and WIKI_BACK). We are aware of the fact that there are public APIs
to access the Wikipedia content in a more convenient way, like JWPL [6], but for
more flexibility in adjusting details we choose to implement these routines ourselves.
In a future version, we also want to extract entities from the article’s first paragraph or
the whole article that are not marked as links. Many concepts in the free text have not
been linked by users to their Wikipedia articles or the article is still missing. This
could further improve the semantic enrichment of topics with nearby concepts.
The performance of the STR was worst in all tasks and did not perform very well
compared with most other approaches. A possible explanation for this is the lack of
consistent controlled vocabulary in Europeana documents and the fact that in at least
50% of all cases no entry was made (see Table 2) in the fields used for co-occurrence
analysis (dc:subject and enrichment:concept_label). Looking at the concepts suggest-
ed by our service one might also doubt the consistency of the vocabulary used in Eu-
ropeana. Topic CHIC-019 might serve as an example. The topics title is philosophical
anthropology and the resulting concepts suggested by our STR service are: звук,
sunet, ήχος, sonido, dźwięk, garsas, zvuk, lyd, ääni, and suono. While the meaning of
these recommendations is not always clear it is apparent that they are of the wrong
language. These were retrieved from the English dataset and should thus be of Eng-
lish language.
These inconsistencies are also reflected in the results of the assessment campaign.
While our approach does perform better than some others it is also clearly surpassed
by approaches which use more controlled vocabulary (e.g. our Wikipedia entities
approach). Extracting concepts using co-occurrence analysis works well if the given
dataset is of high and consistent quality and uses a controlled vocabulary on the ma-
jority of its entries. However, in the given case of Europeana approaches that make
use of external knowledge are better suited.
The WIKI_BACK system in the Ad-hoc task could produce quite satisfying results
that were just under the WIKI_ENTITY system. For the query terms that have Wik-
ipedia entries, this method provides in some cases reasonable results. In contrast, if
9
“[…] we used a Lucene index to compare runs with just the original queries (those runs are
marked with ORIGINALQUERIES in the title) to runs that included the original queries
plus the semantic enrichment suggested by your experiments. These runs were now assessed
for relevance exactly like the ad-hoc runs and you can compare your results with all the
standard metrics.” (excerpt from an organizer’s email)
the query terms are very general or do not exist as Wikipedia entries, this method
would provide “erratic” results. The query terms, e.g. “zeppelin 1900”, “england cup
final”, “unarmed”, or “europe maps 1914”, are difficult to be mapped into Wikipedia
entries. We have no prior knowledge of what users are actually looking for and we
cannot simply adjust these terms into particular Wikipedia entries. As a consequent,
we deal with uncertainty in this matter in order to enrich the query terms with Wik-
ipedia and therefore the results provided by this method are rather ambiguous.
In general we could establish a retrieval environment that while being technically
comparable with the Europeana (Solr-based) system, surpasses some of the previously
described problem in respect to the sparse document and topic representations. Never
the less a lot of issues remain unsolved.
Acknowledgements. This work was partially supported by Deutsche Forschungsge-
meinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), grant number SU 647/5-2.
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