Improving engineering information retrieval by combining tf-idf and product structure classification

Engineering Information Management (EIM) and Information Retrieval (IR) systems are central to the day to day running of large engineering organisations. The capture, interrogation, retrieval and presentation of information from design to disposal is considered to be a key enabler for greater efficiency and decision making and in turn improved productivity, profitability and competitiveness. This paper presents a contribution to the field of engineering IR through combining TF-IDF with classification against the product structure. The results of this initial investigation show that Precision, Recall and F1-Scores can be improved depending on the method of results integration and thus tailored to the search system and context.