Inproceedings,
Concept-based interactive query expansion
CIKM '05: Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, page 696--703. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2005)
DOI: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1099554.1099726
Abstract
Despite the recent advances in search quality, the fast increase in the size of the Web collection has introduced new challenges for Web ranking algorithms. In fact, there are still many situations in which the users are presented with imprecise or very poor results. One of the key difficulties is the fact that users usually submit very short and ambiguous queries, and they do not fully specify their information needs. That is, it is necessary to improve the query formation process if better answers are to be provided. In this work we propose a novel concept-based query expansion technique, which allows disambiguating queries submitted to search engines. The concepts are extracted by analyzing and locating cycles in a special type of query relations graph. This is a directed graph built from query relations mined using association rules. The concepts related to the current query are then shown to the user who selects the one concept that he interprets is most related to his query. This concept is used to expand the original query and the expanded query is processed instead. Using a Web test collection, we show that our approach leads to gains in average precision figures of roughly 32%. Further, if the user also provides information on the type of relation between his query and the selected concept, the gains in average precision go up to roughly 52%.
