Establishing Domain Testing Resources to Support Advance Text-Based Information Retrieval Applications for Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management (AEC/FM)

The paper addressed the lack of and the need to have domain-specific reference collections for supporting text-based information retrieval researches/applications in the domain. Different methods and examples that aided the development of reference collections were overviewed and a collection with 1182 documents and 11 information requests was generated. A task for testing the reference collection was implemented to illustrate the uses and potential applications of the collection. The precise testing task was to evaluate the segmentation-translation strategy for the Chinese contents within the collection for cross-language IR operations. The test results suggested positive answers to the test task. It is expected that the research outcome will provide standard, sharable, and reusable testing resources to support advanced text-retrieval researches and applications in AEC/FM.