Reuben Crimp
ABSTRACT
Query expansion is commonly used to combat the vocabulary mismatch problem, it bridges the disparity between the vocabulary used in the corpus and search queries. However, if expansion terms are not chosen carefully, there is a risk of including spurious expansion terms, which can broaden the potential interpretations of the modified query. Unintentionally increasing the semantic ambiguity in this way is known as query drift.
In this short paper we propose using the query context to inform the expansion term selection process. Using WordNet as an initial source of expansion terms, we refine the candidate expansions by discriminating relevancy. We found that our term selection process is more effective than the standard approach. Our technique targets terms which relate to the entire query as a whole, but predominately focuses on excluding spurious expansion terms. Both help reduce query drift and increase query performance.
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Index Terms
- Refining Query Expansion Terms using Query Context
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