1994 QueryExpansionUsingLexicalSeman
- (Voorhees, 1994) ⇒ Ellen M Voorhees. (1994). “Query Expansion Using Lexical-semantic Relations.” In: Proceedings of the 17th annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, (SIGIR-1994).
Subject Headings: lexical-semantic relation
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Abstract
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 Word Net. 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.
4 Conclusion
The experiments discussed here demonstrate that expansion by general lexical-semantic relations provides little benefit when a user supplies a detailed query. Since query expansion is a recall-enhancing technique, it is not surprising that longer queries benefit less than shorter queries. However, the longer queries are by no means doing a perfect job of retrieval, and they can be improved by other expansion techniques such as relevance feedback [16]. The success of these other methods suggests that the most useful relations for query expansion are idiosyncratic to the particular query in the context of the particular document collection.
Nonetheless, users frequently do not supply a detailed query. In this case, lexical-semantic relations have the potential to improve an initial query, though this expanded query is unlikely to be as effective as a better formulated user-supplied query. The challenge now lies in finding an automatic procedure that is able to select appropriate concepts to expand.
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 QueryExpansionUsingLexicalSeman | Ellen Voorhees | Query Expansion Using Lexical-semantic Relations | 1994 |