QUERY STRUCTURE AND EXPANSION
The co-effects of query structure and expansion on retrieval performance in probabilistic text retrieval.
Jaana Kekäläinen and Kalervo Järvelin
Department of Information Studies
University of Tampere
P.O.Box 607
FIN-33101 TAMPERE, Finland
Kekäläinen, J. & Järvelin, K. (1999). The co-effects of query structure and expansion on retrieval performance in probabilistic text retrieval.
Information Retrieval, 1(4):329-344..
Abstract
The effects of query structures and query expansion (QE) on retrieval
performance were tested with a best match retrieval system (InQuery1).
Query structure means the use of operators to express the relations between
search keys. Six different structures were tested, representing strong
structures (e.g., queries with facets or concepts identified) and weak
structures (no concepts identified, a query is "a bag of search keys").
QE was based on concepts, which were first selected from a searching
thesaurus, and then expanded by semantic relationships given in the
thesaurus. The expansion levels were (a) no expansion, (b) a synonym
expansion, (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 a combination of a facet structure,
where search keys within a facet were treated as instances of one search
key (the SYN operator), and the largest expansion.
1 The InQuery software was provided by the Information Retrieval Laboratory, University of Massachusetts Computer Science Department, Amherst, MA, USA.
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