QUERY STRUCTURE AND EXPANSION
The impact of query structure and query expansion on retrieval performance
Jaana Kekäläinen and Kalervo Järvelin
Department of Information Studies
University of Tampere
P.O.Box 607
FIN-33101 TAMPERE, Finland
Kekäläinen, J. & Järvelin, K. (1998). The impact of query structure and query expansion on retrieval performance. In: Croft, W. B. & Moffat, A. & van Rijsbergen, C.J. & Wilkinson, R. & Zobel, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21th Annual Interna-tional ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR '98), Melbourne, Australia, August 24-28, 1998. New York, NY: ACM Press, pp. 130-137.
Abstract
The effects of query structures and query expansion (QE) on retrieval performance were tested with a best match retrieval system (INQUERY ). Query structure means the use of operators to express the relations between search keys. Eight different structures were tested, representing weak structures (averages and weighted averages of the weights of the keys) and strong structures (e.g., queries with more elabo-rated search key relations). QE was based on concepts, which were first selected from a conceptual model, and then expanded by semantic relationships given in the model. The expansion levels were (a) no expansion, (b) a synonym expan-sion, (c) a narrower concept expansion, (d) an associative concept expansion, and (e) a cumulative expansion of all other expansions. With weak structures and Boolean structured queries, QE was not very effective. The best performance was achieved with one of the strong structures at the largest expansion level.
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