GeoTextMESS: result fusion with fuzzy Borda ranking in geographical information retrieval

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the integration of different GIR systems by means of a fuzzy Borda method for result fusion. Two of the systems, the one by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and the one of the Universidad of Jaén participated to the GeoCLEF task under the name TextMess. The proposed result fusion method takes as input the document lists returned by the different systems and returns a document list where the documents are ranked according to the fuzzy Borda voting scheme. The obtained results show that the fusion method allows to improve the results of the component systems, although the fusion is not optimal, because it is effective only if the components return a similar set of relevant documents.