High performance query expansion using adaptive co-training

The quality of feedback documents is crucial to the effectiveness of query expansion (QE) in ad hoc retrieval. Recently, machine learning methods have been adopted to tackle this issue by training classifiers from feedback documents. However, the lack of proper training data has prevented these methods from selecting good feedback documents. In this paper, we propose a new method, called AdapCOT, which applies co-training in an adaptive manner to select feedback documents for boosting QE’s effectiveness. Co-training is an effective technique for classification over limited training data, which is particularly suitable for selecting feedback documents. The proposed AdapCOT method makes use of a small set of training documents, and labels the feedback documents according to their quality through an iterative process. Two exclusive sets of term-based features are selected to train the classifiers. Finally, QE is performed on the labeled positive documents. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed method improves QE’s effectiveness, and outperforms strong baselines on various standard TREC collections.     

Combining fields for query expansion and adaptive query expansion

In this paper, we aim to improve query expansion for ad-hoc retrieval, by proposing a more fine-grained term reweighting process. This fine-grained process uses statistics from the representation of documents in various fields, such as their titles, the anchor text of their incoming links, and their body content. The contribution of this paper is twofold: First, we propose a novel query expansion mechanism on fields by combining field evidence available in a corpora. Second, we propose an adaptive query expansion mechanism that selects an appropriate collection resource, either the local collection, or a high-quality external resource, for query expansion on a per-query basis. The two proposed query expansion approaches are thoroughly evaluated using two standard Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Web collections, namely the WT10G collection and the large-scale .GOV2 collection. From the experimental results, we observe a statistically significant improvement compared with the baselines. Moreover, we conclude that the adaptive query expansion mechanism is very effective when the external collection used is much larger than the local collection.     

A knowledge-based semantic framework for query expansion

Searching for relevant material that satisfies the information need of a user, within a large document collection is a critical activity for web search engines. Query Expansion techniques are widely used by search engines for the disambiguation of user’s information need and for improving the information retrieval (IR) performance. Knowledge-based, corpus-based and relevance feedback, are the main QE techniques, that employ different approaches for expanding the user query with synonyms of the search terms (word synonymy) in order to bring more relevant documents and for filtering documents that contain search terms but with a different meaning (also known as word polysemy problem) than the user intended. This work, surveys existing query expansion techniques, highlights their strengths and limitations and introduces a new method that combines the power of knowledge-based or corpus-based techniques with that of relevance feedback. Experimental evaluation on three information retrieval benchmark datasets shows that the application of knowledge or corpus-based query expansion techniques on the results of the relevance feedback step improves the information retrieval performance, with knowledge-based techniques providing significantly better results than their simple relevance feedback alternatives in all sets.     

Weighted Word Pairs for query expansion

This paper proposes a novel query expansion method to improve accuracy of text retrieval systems. Our method makes use of a minimal relevance feedback to expand the initial query with a structured representation composed of weighted pairs of words. Such a structure is obtained from the relevance feedback through a method for pairs of words selection based on the Probabilistic Topic Model. We compared our method with other baseline query expansion schemes and methods. Evaluations performed on TREC-8 demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method with respect to the baseline.     

Enhancing query translation with relevance feedback in translingual information retrieval

As an effective technique for improving retrieval effectiveness, relevance feedback (RF) has been widely studied in both monolingual and translingual information retrieval (TLIR). The studies of RF in TLIR have been focused on query expansion (QE), in which queries are reformulated before and/or after they are translated. However, RF in TLIR actually not only can help select better query terms, but also can enhance query translation by adjusting translation probabilities and even resolving some out-of-vocabulary terms. In this paper, we propose a novel relevance feedback method called translation enhancement (TE), which uses the extracted translation relationships from relevant documents to revise the translation probabilities of query terms and to identify extra available translation alternatives so that the translated queries are more tuned to the current search. We studied TE using pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) and interactive relevance feedback (IRF). Our results show that TE can significantly improve TLIR with both types of relevance feedback methods, and that the improvement is comparable to that of query expansion. More importantly, the effects of translation enhancement and query expansion are complementary. Their integration can produce further improvement, and makes TLIR more robust for a variety of queries.     

Adapting information retrieval to query contexts

In current IR approaches documents are retrieved only according to the terms specified in the query. The same answers are returned for the same query whatever the user and the search goal are. In reality, many other contextual factors strongly influence document’s relevance and they should be taken into account in IR operations. This paper proposes a method, based on language modeling, to integrate several contextual factors so that document ranking will be adapted to the specific query contexts. We will consider three contextual factors in this paper: the topic domain of the query, the characteristics of the document collection, as well as context words within the query. Each contextual factor is used to generate a new query language model to specify some aspect of the information need. All these query models are then combined together to produce a more complete model for the underlying information need. Our experiments on TREC collections show that each contextual factor can positively influence the IR effectiveness and the combined model results in the highest effectiveness. This study shows that it is both beneficial and feasible to integrate more contextual factors in the current IR practice.     

Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is a classical technique to improve search engine retrieval effectiveness, by closing the vocabulary gap between users’ query formulations and the relevant documents. While PRF is typically applied on the same target corpus as the final retrieval, in the past, external expansion techniques have sometimes been applied to obtain a high-quality pseudo-relevant feedback set using the external corpus. However, such external expansion approaches have only been studied for sparse (BoW) retrieval methods, and its effectiveness for recent dense retrieval methods remains under-investigated. Indeed, dense retrieval approaches such as ANCE and ColBERT, which conduct similarity search based on encoded contextualised query and document embeddings, are of increasing importance. Moreover, pseudo-relevance feedback mechanisms have been proposed to further enhance dense retrieval effectiveness. In particular, in this work, we examine the application of dense external expansion to improve zero-shot retrieval effectiveness, i.e. evaluation on corpora without further training. Zero-shot retrieval experiments with six datasets, including two TREC datasets and four BEIR datasets, when applying the MSMARCO passage collection as external corpus, indicate that obtaining external feedback documents using ColBERT can significantly improve NDCG@10 for the sparse retrieval (by upto 28%) and the dense retrieval (by upto 12%). In addition, using ANCE on the external corpus brings upto 30% NDCG@10 improvements for the sparse retrieval and upto 29% for the dense retrieval.     

Query expansion with terms selected using lexical cohesion analysis of documents

We present new methods of query expansion using terms that form lexical cohesive links between the contexts of distinct query terms in documents (i.e., words surrounding the query terms in text). The link-forming terms (link-terms) and short snippets of text surrounding them are evaluated in both interactive and automatic query expansion (QE). We explore the effectiveness of snippets in providing context in interactive query expansion, compare query expansion from snippets vs. whole documents, and query expansion following snippet selection vs. full document relevance judgements. The evaluation, conducted on the HARD track data of TREC 2005, suggests that there are considerable advantages in using link-terms and their surrounding short text snippets in QE compared to terms selected from full-texts of documents.     

An empirical study of query expansion and cluster-based retrieval in language modeling approach

The term mismatch problem in information retrieval is a critical problem, and several techniques have been developed, such as query expansion, cluster-based retrieval and dimensionality reduction to resolve this issue. Of these techniques, this paper performs an empirical study on query expansion and cluster-based retrieval. We examine the effect of using parsimony in query expansion and the effect of clustering algorithms in cluster-based retrieval. In addition, query expansion and cluster-based retrieval are compared, and their combinations are evaluated in terms of retrieval performance by performing experimentations on seven test collections of NTCIR and TREC.     

Elicitation and use of relevance feedback information

The paper presents two approaches to interactively refining user search formulations and their evaluation in the new High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) track of TREC-12. The first method consists of asking the user to select a number of sentences that represent documents. The second method consists of showing to the user a list of noun phrases extracted from the initial document set. Both methods then expand the query based on the user feedback. The TREC results show that one of the methods is an effective means of interactive query expansion and yields significant performance improvements. The paper presents a comparison of the methods and detailed analysis of the evaluation results.     

A deterministic resampling method using overlapping document clusters for pseudo-relevance feedback

Typical pseudo-relevance feedback methods assume the top-retrieved documents are relevant and use these pseudo-relevant documents to expand terms. The initial retrieval set can, however, contain a great deal of noise. In this paper, we present a cluster-based resampling method to select novel pseudo-relevant documents based on Lavrenko’s relevance model approach. The main idea is to use overlapping clusters to find dominant documents for the initial retrieval set, and to repeatedly use these documents to emphasize the core topics of a query.     

SDQE: towards automatic semantic query optimization in P2P systems

Conventional information retrieval technology (i.e. VSM) faces many difficulties when being implemented in complex P2P systems for the lack of global statistic information (e.g. IDF) and central services. In this paper, we suggest a novel query optimization scheme (Semantic Dual Query Expansion, SDQE) that makes full use of the context information supplied by the local document collection. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is used to explore the local context information. By comparing the different local context information hidden in different document collections, it is possible to solve the synonymy–polysemy problem in VSM. The experiments prove that our scheme is effective to improve the retrieval performance in P2P systems without knowing the global statistic information.     

Examining the effectiveness of real-time query expansion

Interactive query expansion (IQE) (c.f. [Efthimiadis, E. N. (1996). Query expansion. Annual Review of Information Systems and Technology, 31, 121–187]) is a potentially useful technique to help searchers formulate improved query statements, and ultimately retrieve better search results. However, IQE is seldom used in operational settings. Two possible explanations for this are that IQE is generally not integrated into searchers’ established information-seeking behaviors (e.g., examining lists of documents), and it may not be offered at a time in the search when it is needed most (i.e., during the initial query formulation). These challenges can be addressed by coupling IQE more closely with familiar search activities, rather than as a separate functionality that searchers must learn. In this article we introduce and evaluate a variant of IQE known as Real-Time Query Expansion (RTQE). As a searcher enters their query in a text box at the interface, RTQE provides a list of suggested additional query terms, in effect offering query expansion options while the query is formulated. To investigate how the technique is used – and when it may be useful – we conducted a user study comparing three search interfaces: a baseline interface with no query expansion support; an interface that provides expansion options during query entry, and a third interface that provides options after queries have been submitted to a search system. The results show that offering RTQE leads to better quality initial queries, more engagement in the search, and an increase in the uptake of query expansion. However, the results also imply that care must be taken when implementing RTQE interactively. Our findings have broad implications for how IQE should be offered, and form part of our research on the development of techniques to support the increased use of query expansion.     

A Prospect-Guided global query expansion strategy using word embeddings

The effectiveness of query expansion methods depends essentially on identifying good candidates, or prospects, semantically related to query terms. Word embeddings have been used recently in an attempt to address this problem. Nevertheless query disambiguation is still necessary as the semantic relatedness of each word in the corpus is modeled, but choosing the right terms for expansion from the standpoint of the un-modeled query semantics remains an open issue. In this paper we propose a novel query expansion method using word embeddings that models the global query semantics from the standpoint of prospect vocabulary terms. The proposed method allows to explore query-vocabulary semantic closeness in such a way that new terms, semantically related to more relevant topics, are elicited and added in function of the query as a whole. The method includes candidates pooling strategies that address disambiguation issues without using exogenous resources. We tested our method with three topic sets over CLEF corpora and compared it across different Information Retrieval models and against another expansion technique using word embeddings as well. Our experiments indicate that our method achieves significant results that outperform the baselines, improving both recall and precision metrics without relevance feedback.     

Information retrieval with geographical references. Relevant documents filtering vs. query expansion

This is a thorough analysis of two techniques applied to Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR). Previous studies have researched the application of query expansion to improve the selection process of information retrieval systems. This paper emphasizes the effectiveness of the filtering of relevant documents applied to a GIR system, instead of query expansion. Based on the CLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) framework available, several experiments have been run. Some based on query expansion, some on the filtering of relevant documents. The results show that filtering works better in a GIR environment, because relevant documents are not reordered in the final list.     

A Wikipedia powered state-based approach to automatic search query enhancement

This paper describes the development and testing of a novel Automatic Search Query Enhancement (ASQE) algorithm, the Wikipedia N Sub-state Algorithm (WNSSA), which utilises Wikipedia as the sole data source for prior knowledge. This algorithm is built upon the concept of iterative states and sub-states, harnessing the power of Wikipedia’s data set and link information to identify and utilise reoccurring terms to aid term selection and weighting during enhancement. This algorithm is designed to prevent query drift by making callbacks to the user’s original search intent by persisting the original query between internal states with additional selected enhancement terms. The developed algorithm has shown to improve both short and long queries by providing a better understanding of the query and available data. The proposed algorithm was compared against five existing ASQE algorithms that utilise Wikipedia as the sole data source, showing an average Mean Average Precision (MAP) improvement of 0.273 over the tested existing ASQE algorithms.     

Optimization of some factors affecting the performance of query expansion

This paper examines the factors affecting the performance of global query expansion based on term co-occurrence data and suggests a way to maximize the retrieval effectiveness. Major parameters to be optimized through experiments are term similarity measure and the weighting scheme of additional terms. The evaluation of four similarity measures tested in query expansion reveal that mutual information and Yule's Y, which emphasize low frequency terms, achieve better performance than cosine and Jaccard coefficients that have the reverse tendency. In the evaluation of three weighting schemes, similarity weight performs well only with short queries, whereas fixed weights of approximately 0.5 and similarity rank weights were effective with queries of any length. Furthermore, the optimal similarity rank weight achieving the best overall performance seems to be the least affected by test collections and the number of additional terms. For the efficiency of retrieval, the number of additional terms needs not exceed 70 in our test collections, but the optimal number may vary according to the characteristics of the similarity measure employed.     

A Query Expansion Framework in Image Retrieval Domain Based on Local and Global Analysis

We present an image retrieval framework based on automatic query expansion in a concept feature space by generalizing the vector space model of information retrieval. In this framework, images are represented by vectors of weighted concepts similar to the keyword-based representation used in text retrieval. To generate the concept vocabularies, a statistical model is built by utilizing Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based classification techniques. The images are represented as "bag of concepts" that comprise perceptually and/or semantically distinguishable color and texture patches from local image regions in a multi-dimensional feature space. To explore the correlation between the concepts and overcome the assumption of feature independence in this model, we propose query expansion techniques in the image domain from a new perspective based on both local and global analysis. For the local analysis, the correlations between the concepts based on the co-occurrence pattern, and the metrical constraints based on the neighborhood proximity between the concepts in encoded images, are analyzed by considering local feedback information. We also analyze the concept similarities in the collection as a whole in the form of a similarity thesaurus and propose an efficient query expansion based on the global analysis. The experimental results on a photographic collection of natural scenes and a biomedical database of different imaging modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of precision and recall.     

A relevance feedback mechanism for cluster-based retrieval

Contextual document clustering is a novel approach which uses information theoretic measures to cluster semantically related documents bound together by an implicit set of concepts or themes of narrow specificity. It facilitates cluster-based retrieval by assessing the similarity between a query and the cluster themes’ probability distribution. In this paper, we assess a relevance feedback mechanism, based on query refinement, that modifies the query’s probability distribution using a small number of documents that have been judged relevant to the query. We demonstrate that by providing only one relevance judgment, a performance improvement of 33% was obtained.