CILKS Project Overview
The CILKS project objectives were to:
The INSPEC document database and thesaurus
was loaded into the Oracle RDBMS, and a
system for interactive thesaurus navigation
was implemented.
Using this system, a series of small-scale
evaluation experiments was conducted, to collect data and ascertain:
- how users selected terms from the thesaurus: see examples of
individual and
summary navigation logs.
- whether these terms helped to improve the search performance of the
original query: see relevance statistics.
General conclusions were:
- No strong patterns of thesaurus navigation and term selection emerged
to form the basis of automatic query enhancement procedures. We need
to provide good support for interactive thesaurus consultation.
- The effect of adding thesaurus terms was to find new relevant documents,
but not always to improve overall search performance. We need to
integrate thesaurus consultation with other probabilistic query
expansion methods.