The Sheffield and Basque Country Universities Entry to CHiC: Using Random Walks and Similarity to Access Cultural Heritage

The Cultural Heritage in CLEF 2012 (CHiC) pilot evaluation included these tasks: ad-hoc retrieval, semantic enrichment and variability tasks. At CHiC 2012, the University of Sheffield and the University of the Basque Country submitted a joint entry, attempting the three English monolingual tasks. For the ad-hoc task, the baseline approach used the Indri Search engine. Query expansion approaches used random walks using Personalised Page Rank over graphs constructed from Wikipedia and WordNet, and also by finding similar articles within Wikipedia. For the semantic enrichment task, random walks using Personalised Page Rank were again used. Additionally links to Wikipedia were added and further approaches used this information to find enrichment terms. Finally for the variability task, TF-IDF scores were calculated from text and meta-data fields. The final results were selected using MMR (Maximal Marginal Relevance) and cosine similarity.