Andrew
Trotman and Mounia Lalmas
For many years it
has been commonly held that a user who adds structural “hints” to a query will
improve precision in an element retrieval search. At INEX 2005 we conducted an
experiment to test this assumption. We present the unexpected result that struc-tural hints in queries do not improve precision. An
analysis of the topics and the judgments suggests that this is because users
are particularly bad at giving structural hints.