Article

Free access

Questioning query expansion: an examination of behaviour and parameters

Authors:

Bodo Billerbeck,

Justin ZobelAuthors Info & Claims

ADC '04: Proceedings of the 15th Australasian database conference - Volume 27

Pages 69 - 76

Published: 01 January 2004 Publication History

Abstract

In information retrieval, queries can fail to find documents due to mismatch in terminology. Query expansion is a well-known technique addressing this problem, where additional query terms are automatically chosen from highly ranked documents, and it has been shown to be effective at improving query performance. However, current techniques for query expansion use fixed values for key parameters, determined by tuning on test collections. In this paper we show that these parameters may not be generally applicable, and more significantly that the assumption that the same parameter settings can be used for all queries is invalid. Using detailed experiments with two test collections, we demonstrate that new methods for choosing parameters must be found. However, our experiments also demonstrate that there is considerable further scope for improvement to effectiveness through better query expansion.

References

[1]

Arampatzis, A. & van der Weide, T. (2001), "Document filtering as an adaptive and temporally-dependent process".

[2]

Baeza-Yates, R. & Ribeiro-Neto, B. (1999), Modern Information Retrieval, Addison-Wesley Longman.

Digital Library

[3]

Bharat, K. & Henzinger, M. R. (1998), Improved algorithms for topic distillation in a hyperlinked environment, in "Proceedings of SIGIR-98, 21st ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval", Melbourne, AU, pp. 104--111.

Digital Library

[4]

Billerbeck, B., Scholer, F., Williams, H. E. & Zobel, J. (2003), Query Expansion using Associated Queries, in "Conference on Information and Knowledge Management", to appear.

Digital Library

[5]

Broder, A. (2002), "A taxonomy of web search", ACM SIGIR Forum36(2), 3--10.

Digital Library

[6]

Buckley, C., Salton, G., Allan, J. & Singhal, A (1994), Automatic query expansion using SMART: TREC 3, in "Text REtrieval Conference".

[7]

Carpineto, C., de Mori, R., Romano, G. & Bigi, B. (2001), "An information-theoretic approach to automatic query expansion", ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)19(1), 1--27.

Digital Library

[8]

Cronen-Townsend, S., Zhou, Y. & Croft, W. B. (2002), Predicting query performance, in "Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval", SIGIR Forum, ACM Press, New Orleans, Louisianna, USA.

Digital Library

[9]

Foskett, D. J. (1997), Readings in information retrieval, in K. S. Jones & P. Willet, eds, "Thesaurus", Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco, California, USA, pp. 111--134.

Digital Library

[10]

Frakes, W. B. & Baeza-Yates, R., eds (1992), Information Retrieval: Data Structures and Algorithms, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Digital Library

[11]

Harman, D. (1995), "Overview of the second Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-2)", Information Processing & Management31(3), 271--289.

Digital Library

[12]

Hoashi, K., Matsumoto, K., Inoue, N. & Hashimoto, K. (1999), Query expansion method based on word contribution (poster abstract), in "Proceedings of the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval", ACM Press, pp. 303--304.

Digital Library

[13]

Kang, I.-H. & Kim, G. (2003), Query type classification for web document retrieval, in "Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval", ACM Press, pp. 64--71.

Digital Library

[14]

Kaszkiel, M. & Zobel, J. (2001), "Effective ranking with arbitrary passages", Journal of the American Society of Information Science52(4), 344--364.

Digital Library

[15]

Kwok, K. L. (2002), Higher precision for two-word queries, in "Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual international conference on Research and development in information retrieval", ACM Press, pp. 395--396.

Digital Library

[16]

Leuski, A. (2000), Relevance and reinforcement in interactive browsing, in "Conference on Information and Knowledge Management", pp. 119--126.

Digital Library

[17]

Mandala, R., Tokunaga, T. & Tanaka, H. (1999), Combining multiple evidence from different types of thesaurus for query expansion, in "Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval", ACM Press, Berkeley, California.

Digital Library

[18]

Mano, H. & Ogawa, Y. (2001), Selecting expansion terms in automatic query expansion, in "Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval", ACM Press, pp. 390--391.

Digital Library

[19]

Page, L., Brin, S., Motwani, R. & Winograd, T. (1998), The pagerank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web, Technical report, Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project.

[20]

Qiu, Y. & Frei, H.-P. (1993), Concept based query expansion, in "Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval", ACM Press, pp. 160--169.

Digital Library

[21]

Rijsbergen, C. J. V. (1979), Information Retrieval, 2nd edition, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Glasgow.

Digital Library

[22]

Robertson, S. E. & Walker, S. (1999), Okapi/Keenbow at TREC-8, in "The Eighth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-8)", NIST Special Publication 500-264, Gaithersburg, MD, pp. 151--161.

[23]

Robertson, S. E. & Walker, S. (2000), Microsoft Cambridge at TREC-9: Filtering Track, in "The Ninth Text RE-trieval Conference (TREC-9)", NIST Special Publication 500-249, Gaithersburg, MD, pp. 361--368.

[24]

Robertson, S. E., Walker, S., Hancock-Beaulieu, M., Gull, A. & Lau, M. (1992), Okapi at TREC, in "Text RETrieval Conference", pp. 21--30.

[25]

Rocchio, J. J. (1971), Relevance feedback in information retrieval, in E. Ide & G. Salton, eds, "The Smart Retrieval System --- Experiments in Automatic Document Processing", Prentice-Hall, Englewood, Cliffs, New Jersey, pp. 313--323.

[26]

Sakai, T. & Robertson, S. E. (2001), Flexible pseudo-relevance feedback using optimization tables, in "Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval", ACM Press, pp. 396--397.

Digital Library

[27]

Salton, G. (1989), Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by Computer, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

Digital Library

[28]

Salton, G. & McGill, M. J. (1983), Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval, McGraw-Hill, New York.

Digital Library

[29]

Scholer, F. & Williams, H. E. (2002), Query association for effective retrieval, in C. Nicholas, D. Grossman, K. Kalpakis, S. Qureshi, H. van Dissel & L. Seligman, eds, "Conference on Information and Knowledge Management", McLean, VA, pp. 324--331.

Digital Library

[30]

Schwartz, C. (1998), "Web search engines", Journal of the American Society for Information Science49(11), 973--982.

Digital Library

[31]

Sparck-Jones, K., Walker, S. & Robertson, S. E. (2000), "A probabilistic model of information retrieval: development and comparative experiments. Parts 1&2", Information Processing and Management36(6), 779--840.

Digital Library

[32]

Spink, A., Wolfram, D., Jansen, M. B. J. & Saracevic, T. (2002), "From e-sex to e-commerce: Web search changes", IEEE Computer35(3), 107--109.

Digital Library

[33]

Voorhees, E. M. & Harman, D. K. (1999), Overview of the Eighth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-8), in E. M. Voorhees & D. K. Harman, eds, "The Eighth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 8)", National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 500-249, Gaithersburg, MD, pp. 1--23.

[34]

Voorhees, E. M. & Harman, D. K. (2000), Overview of the Ninth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-9), in E. M. Voorhees & D. K. Harman, eds, "The Ninth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 9)", National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 500-249, Gaithersburg, MD, pp. 1--14.

[35]

Witten, I. H., Moffat, A. & Bell, T. C. (1999), Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images., 2nd edn, Morgan Kaufman Publishing, San Francisco.

Digital Library

[36]

Xu, J. & Croft, W. B. (1996), Query expansion using local and global document analysis, in "Proceedings of the 19th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval", ACM Press, pp. 4--11.

Digital Library

Cited By

Zobel J(2023)When Measurement MisleadsACM SIGIR Forum10.1145/3582524.358254056:1(1-20)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582524.3582540
Benham RCulpepper J(2017)Risk-Reward Trade-offs in Rank FusionProceedings of the 22nd Australasian Document Computing Symposium10.1145/3166072.3166084(1-8)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3166072.3166084
Paik JPal DParui S(2014)Incremental blind feedbackACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing10.1145/261152113:3(1-22)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2611521
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Questioning query expansion: an examination of behaviour and parameters
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Information retrieval query processing
    2. Retrieval models and ranking

Recommendations

Query expansion based on term distribution and DBpedia features
Highlights
- Query expansion based on term distribution is better than Pseudo Relevance Feedback.
Abstract
Query Expansion (QE) approaches that involve the reformulation of queries by adding new terms to the initial user query, are intended to ameliorate the vocabulary mismatch between the query keywords and the documents’ in Information ...
Query Expansion by Mining User Logs

Queries to search engines on the Web are usually short. They do not provide sufficient information for an effective selection of relevant documents. Previous research has proposed the utilization of query expansion to deal with this problem. However, ...
Improving query expansion using pseudo-relevant web knowledge for information retrieval
Highlights
- Web knowledge-based query expansion technique uses the top N pseudo relevant web pages
Abstract
In the field of information retrieval, query expansion (QE) has long been used as a technique to deal with the fundamental issue of word mismatch between a user’s query and the target information. In the context of the relationship ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image DL Hosted proceedings

ADC '04: Proceedings of the 15th Australasian database conference - Volume 27

January 2004

214 pages

Publisher

Australian Computer Society, Inc.

Australia

Publication History

Published: 01 January 2004

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

ADC '04

01 01 2004

Dunedin, New Zealand

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 98 of 224 submissions, 44%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

20
Total Citations
View Citations
661
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)73
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)16

Reflects downloads up to 02 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Zobel J(2023)When Measurement MisleadsACM SIGIR Forum10.1145/3582524.358254056:1(1-20)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582524.3582540
Benham RCulpepper J(2017)Risk-Reward Trade-offs in Rank FusionProceedings of the 22nd Australasian Document Computing Symposium10.1145/3166072.3166084(1-8)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3166072.3166084
Paik JPal DParui S(2014)Incremental blind feedbackACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing10.1145/261152113:3(1-22)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2611521
Jin XSloan MWang JSchwabe DAlmeida VGlaser HBaeza-Yates RMoon S(2013)Interactive exploratory search for multi page search resultsProceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2488388.2488446(655-666)Online publication date: 13-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2488388.2488446
Bhogal JMacfarlane A(2013)Ontology Based Query Expansion with a Probabilistic Retrieval ModelProceedings of the 6th Information Retrieval Facility Conference on Multidisciplinary Information Retrieval - Volume 820110.1007/978-3-642-41057-4_2(5-16)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-41057-4_2
Carpineto CRomano G(2012)A Survey of Automatic Query Expansion in Information RetrievalACM Computing Surveys10.1145/2071389.207139044:1(1-50)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2071389.2071390
Ganguly DLeveling JJones G(2011)Query expansion for language modeling using sentence similaritiesProceedings of the Second international conference on Multidisciplinary information retrieval facility10.5555/2018142.2018151(62-77)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2018142.2018151
Egozi OMarkovitch SGabrilovich E(2011)Concept-Based Information Retrieval Using Explicit Semantic AnalysisACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/1961209.196121129:2(1-34)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1961209.1961211
Leveling JJones G(2010)Classifying and filtering blind feedback terms to improve information retrieval effectivenessAdaptivity, Personalization and Fusion of Heterogeneous Information10.5555/1937055.1937096(156-163)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1937055.1937096
Leveling JJones G(2010)Sub-Word Indexing and Blind Relevance Feedback for English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IRACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing10.1145/1838745.18387499:3(1-30)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1838745.1838749
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten