Andrew
Trotman and Mounia Lalmas
There has been
much debate over how to interpret the structure in queries that contain
structural hints. At INEX 2003 and 2004, there were two interpretations: SCAS
in which the user specified target element was interpreted strictly, and VCAS
in which it was interpreted vaguely. But
how many ways are there that the query could be interpreted? In the investigation at INEX 2005 (discussed
herein) four different interpretations were proposed, and compared on the same
queries. Those interpretations (SSCAS,
SVCAS, VSCAS, and VVCAS) are the four interpretations possible by interpreting
the target elements, and the support elements, either strictly or vaguely. An analysis of the submitted runs shows that
those that share an interpretation of the target element correlate - that is,
the previous decision to divide CAS into the SCAS and VCAS (as done at INEX 2003
and 2004) was sound. The analysis is
supported by the fact that the best performing VSCAS run was submitted to the
VVCAS task and the best performing SVCAS run was submitted to the SSCAS task.