This paper presents a new user feedback mechanism based on Wikipedia concepts for interactive retrieval. In this mechanism, the system presents to the user a group of Wikipedia concepts, and the user can choose those relevant to refine his her query. To realize this mechanism, we propose methods to address two problems: 1) how to select a small number of possibly relevant Wikipedia concepts to show the user, and 2) how to re-rank retrieved documents given the user-identified Wikipedia concepts. Our methods are evaluated on three TREC data sets. The experiment results show that our methods can dramatically improve retrieval performances.
Query expansion is a fundamental technique for dealing with the term mismatch problem in information retrieval. The basic idea is to find additional terms that are related to the underlying information need to expand the user query. Many methods for term selection have been studied @cite_4 @cite_21 @cite_11 @cite_6 @cite_3 @cite_9 @cite_19 . In this paper, our document ranking methods are based on query expansion. We rely on user-identified Wikipedia concepts to select high-quality terms for query expansion.
@cite_4 @cite_9 @cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_6 @cite_19 @cite_11
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Automatic query expansion has long been suggested as a technique for dealing with the fundamental issue of word mismatch in information retrieval. A number of approaches to expansion have been studied and, more recently, attention has focused on techniques that analyze the corpus to discover word relationship (global techniques) and those that analyze documents retrieved by the initial query ( local feedback). In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of these approaches and show that, although global analysis haa some advantages, local analysia is generally more effective. We also show that using global analysis techniques. In the framework of a relevance feedback system, term values or term weights may be used to (a) select new terms for inclusion in a query, and or (b) weight the terms for retrieval purposes once selected. It has sometimes been assumed that the same weighting formula should be used for both purposes. This paper sketches a quantitative argument which suggests that the two purposes require different weighting formulae. Applications such as office automation, news filtering, help facilities in complex systems, and the like require the ability to retrieve documents from full-text databases where vocabulary problems can be particularly severe. Experiments performed on small collections with single-domain thesauri suggest that expanding query vectors with words that are lexically related to the original query words can ameliorate some of the problems of mismatched vocabularies. This paper examines the utility of lexical query expansion in the large, diverse TREC collection. Concepts are represented by WordNet synonym sets and are expanded by following the typed links included in WordNet. Experimental results show this query expansion technique makes little difference in retrieval effectiveness if the original queries are relatively complete descriptions of the information being sought even when the concepts to be expanded are selected by hand. Less well developed queries can be significantly improved by expansion of hand-chosen concepts. However, an automatic procedure that can approximate the set of hand picked synonym sets has yet to be devised, and expanding by the synonym sets that are automatically generated can degrade retrieval performance. Most casual users of IR systems type short queries. Recent research has shown that adding new words to these queries via odhoc feedback improves the retrieval effectiveness of such queries. We investigate ways to improve this query expansion process by refining the set of documents used in feedback. We start by using manually formulated Boolean filters along with proximity constraints. Our approach is similar to the one proposed by Hearst[l2]. Next, we investigate a completely automatic method that makes use of term cooccurrence information to estimate word correlation. Experimental results show that refining the set of documents used in query expansion often prevents the query drift caused by blind expansion and yields substantial improvements in retrieval effectiveness, both in terms of average precision and precision in the top twenty documents. More importantly, the fully automatic approach developed in this study performs competitively with the best manual approach and requires little computational overhead. The Smart information retrieval project emphasizes completely automatic approaches to the understanding and retrieval of large quantities of text. We continue our work in TREC 3, performing runs in the routing, ad-hoc, and foreign language environments. Our major focus is massive query expansion : adding from 300 to 530 terms to each query. These terms come from known relevant documents in the case of routing, and from just the top retrieved documents in the case of ad-hoc and Spanish. This approach improves effectiveness from 7 to 25 in the various experiments. Other ad-hoc work extends our investigations into combining global similarities, giving an overall indication of how a document matches a query, with local similarities identifying a smaller part of the document which matches the query. Using an overlapping text window definition of local, we achieve a 16 improvement. Abstract : The relevance feedback track in TREC 2009 focuses on two sub tasks: actively selecting good documents for users to provide relevance feedback and retrieving documents based on user relevance feedback. For the first task, we tried a clustering based method and the Transductive Experimental Design (TED) method proposed by . For clustering based method, we use the K-means algorithm to cluster the top retrieved documents and choose the most representative document of each cluster. The TED method aims to find documents that are hard-to-predict and representative of the unlabeled documents. For the second task, we did query expansion based on a relevance model learned on the relevant documents. Query expansion methods have been studied for a long time - with debatable success in many instances. In this paper we present a probabilistic query expansion model based on a similarity thesaurus which was constructed automatically. A similarity thesaurus reflects domain knowledge about the particular collection from which it is constructed. We address the two important issues with query expansion: the selection and the weighting of additional search terms. In contrast to earlier methods, our queries are expanded by adding those terms that are most similar to the concept of the query, rather than selecting terms that are similar to the query terms. Our experiments show that this kind of query expansion results in a notable improvement in the retrieval effectiveness when measured using both recall-precision and usefulness.