MSRA columbus at GeoCLEF 2006

Abstract

This paper describes the participation of Columbus Project of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) in GeoCLEF 2006. We participated in the Monolingual GeoCLEF evaluation (EN-EN) and submitted five runs based on different methods. In this paper, we describe our geographic information retrieval system, discuss the results and draw following conclusions: 1) if we just extract locations from the topics automatically without any expansions as geo-terms, the retrieval performance is barely satisfactory; 2) automatic query expansion weakens the performance; 3) if the queries are expanded manually, the performance is significantly improved. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.