Search Strategy Goal: Increasing Recall

The objective is to identify a search strategy that increases recall. Recall refers to the measure of retrieved documents that are relevant. Higher recall means finding more of the relevant documents, even if it includes some irrelevant ones.

Truncation Strategy for Recall

Truncation involves using a symbol (like '*' or '$') to search for different word endings or variations of a root word. For example, using 'comput*' would find 'computer', 'computing', 'computation', etc. This method systematically broadens the search query to include various forms of a term, significantly increasing the likelihood of retrieving all relevant documents and thus boosting recall.

Other Strategies' Impact on Recall

• Proximity operators (e.g., NEAR, ADJ) specify the distance between search terms. They tend to increase precision (fewer irrelevant results) rather than recall.
• The Boolean operator 'NOT' excludes results containing a specific term. This narrows the results and decreases recall.
• The Boolean operator 'AND' requires all specified terms to be present in the results. This narrows the search and increases precision at the expense of recall.

Conclusion on Recall Enhancement

Based on the analysis, truncation is the search strategy most effective in increasing recall output.