Six test collections in one

Information retrieval is a field of research reaching from computer and information science to lingusitics. As a linguist in the information retrieval field, I leave the quest for effective search engines and evaluation models to others, and focus on language aspects. Words, and parts of words such as compound constituents, which are successful in queries, what fea-tures do they have in common? Does the domain of search terms have impact in a domain specific environment? Can search terms with certain features help users of different categories find documents suited for them? This paper describes the making of an in-formation retrieval test collection which made it possible to study these ques-tions. The test collection will be used to Evaluate search strategies to retrieve Medical documents, hence the name. To study language aspects of information retrieval a new test collection was called for, a collection which was domain specific, which re-garded user groups, and which had double indexes Table 1: The genres of the MedEval document sources. (D. Kokkinakis, p.c.