Construction and evaluation of a prototype topological information retrieval system

A prototype topological information retrieval system (TIRS) has been created and subjected to preliminary testing. Two standard test suites, the CACM collection and the MED collection, were used in the test. The queries in each test suite were converted into disjunctive normal form and one document-retrieval pass was performed for each converted query. Precision and recall were measured for each query. The average value for precision was 0.763, while the average value for recall was 0.188. These values correspond to values of 0.529 and 0.114 for a slightly modified Boolean retrieval run as a control case. An analysis of the results indicates that the TIRS prototype performs significantly better than the Boolean control at ⩾0.999 level of confidence