Improving Document Ranking for Long Queries with Nested Query Segmentation
In this research, we explore nested or hierarchical query segmentation (An extended version of this paper is available at http:/research.microsoft.com/pubs/259980/2015 msri tr nest seg.pdf) where segments are defined recursively as consisting of contiguous sequences of segments or query words, as a more effective representation of a query. We design a lightweight and unsupervised nested segmentation scheme, and propose how to use the tree arising out of the nested representation of a query to improve ranking performance. We show that nested segmentation can lead to significant gains over state of the art flat segmentation strategies.
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