the top 1000 IDs; if less than three the top i00~ trom the set which was finally "current" were output. There seemed to be an impression that the new top- ics (topics3) are more difficult than the old. Results may also have been affected by the huge stoplist which was being used at that time because of a breakdown of the only disk large enough to hold the very large scratch files generated during inversion. Lack of the number "6" affected one topic, days of the week all- other ("Black Monday"). The searcher was urged to leave "Black Monday" to the end in case we were able to reindex before the deadline, but she decided to try it and thought it worked quite well. An edited transcript of one searcher's notes is given below as Appendix B. 5.3 Results The official results of the manual run (Table 5) are dis- appointing, with average precision 0.232 (60% of topics below median), precision at 100 docs 0.4 and recall 0.59. The final iteration was later re-run with BM1t instead of BM15, and the results combined with the feedback documents from the original searches for a frozen ranks evaluation5. This did somewhat better on a majority of the topics, but overall the manual results were very poor compared to some of the autoniatic runs. 6 Other experiments 6.1 Query modification without relevance information Some iterative automatic ad hoc runs were done in which the top 10-50 documents obtained by the best existing method were used (a) as a source of additional terms and (b) as a source of "relevance" information for the ~(1) weight calculation. Expansion terms were selected as described in Section 4.2, in descending order of r ~ ~ The maximum R number of additional terms was set at half the number of query terms. For many of the topics most of the top terms extracted from the feedback documents were in any case topic terms, so the number of additional terms was small. Example (topic 112) Topic 112: Funding biotechnology 30 feedback documents used In the table which follows, term sources are given either as doc, in the case of expansion terms, or as a topic field, where tit> con> nrlr> desc. In this example, final weights involve a qtf component, and were obtained using equation 6 with 5There were two topics where the searcher found no relevant documents, so for these topics the original results were inserted. 28 (tile res~ilting weight was multiplied i~y k3 to obtain ad~(jUate gia~ular~ty hL an integer representation). For ex- pansion terms., was taken as 1 and the same correction apph(d. `Term :`rc qif ~ docs `)iotechnoiog] fit 9 30 -oft 4 29 fund tit 2 23 capit r 2 21 ph arrnaceo t doc (0) 15 ventur it ar 1 21 tinanci.. - oar 2 17 startup.. nar 1 11 research n i- r 26 f"n.1nc doc (0~ 15 partner doc (0) 17 dreg dcc (0) 18 rovestor dcc (0) 19 ~,rovid oar 14 1i?~ 1 22 lechnologi dcc (0) 23 company... doc (0) 28 academ nar 1 4 corpor oar 2 9 desc 1 18 stock nar 1 20 industri doc (0) 23 develop dcc (0) 25 laborat on nar 1 9 quantifi oar 1 1 profit nar 1 14 enterpr nar 1 4 estabh.sh oar 1 10 arena* tiar 2 0 data oar 4 6 sale nar 1 12 loss nar 1 7 government. liar 1 13 assist nar 1 6 much desc 1 11 answer desc 1 2 follow oar 1 7 rel* desc 1 1 eg* nar 1 0 question desc 1 3 worldwid* nar 2 0 division * oar 1 2 fig~~* nar 1 2 Weights 145 80 55 51 73 67 36 62 61 54 55 53 - 52 66 21 36 50 50 - 48 73 48 76 26 37 43 33 43 42 - 42 51 39 82 39 40 38 59 33 38 29 148 15 108 8 30 24 39 22 24 20 39 20 28 20 52 16 26 9 52 9 67 8 37 8 126 4 41 6 41 5 Orig 765 148 78 78 55 64 70 35 6 from the topic. The here, Iline of the 43 terms are not starred terms were not used in the final search because their selection value ~ ~ is zero (to the nearest integer). For this topic, the additional terms were beneficial and reweighting alone rather neu+ral. 6The terms followed by ellipses represent synonym classe~ Final 614 213 88 81 64 59 57 55 54 48 48 47 46 45 44 44 42 42 41 38 38 37 37 34 34 33 29 25 24 21 21 19 17 17 17 14 8 8 7 7 6 5 4