------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ****************************************************************************** ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ B O S T O N U N I V E R S I T Y Computer Science Department C O L L O Q U I U M Wednesday, March 26, 1997 3:00 pm (Coffee served at 2:30 pm, Room MCS 137) Room MCS 135 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ****************************************************************************** ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What You Saw is What You Want: Using Cases to Seed Information Retrieval Jody Daniels Department of Computer Science University of Massachusetts at Amherst http://cbr-www.cs.umass.edu/~daniels As the amount of on-line information grows it becomes increasingly difficult to figure out quickly which documents have the information you want, and where within these documents the crucial bits of information lie. To help reduce the amount of presented text, enhance retrieval accuracy while minimizing user effort, and provide a means of converting data into information, we have built a system that automatically generates high-quality queries based on related documents and excerpts. I will describe the SPIRE system with its two phases of retrieval. In the first phase it retrieves documents by relying on a case-based reasoner to ``seed'' an information retrieval system with a small set of texts on the topic. In the second, SPIRE retrieves passages pertinent to specific features of the topic by using a set of excerpts associated with each feature. I will report on the testing of SPIRE over a variety of features, as well as across numerous methods for forming queries. Host: Prof. Azer Bestavros ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For colloquium info, including directions, see http://www.cs.bu.edu/colloquium For more information contact Prof. David Yates ------------------------------------------------------------------------------