Query expansion: Internet mining vs. pseudo relevance feedback

Abstract

Abstract We report an investigation of techniques for mining world wide web in order to identify terms (single words or phrases) that are highly related to a topic (query) described by a short (one sentence or a paragraph‐long) interest statement. These terms are subsequently used to improve automated document retrieval. By following a standard testing methodology, we established that our technique improves the effectiveness of retrieval up to 8% over BM25 combined with pseudo‐relevance feedback, which is currently known to be one of the best ranking functions, and was indeed the strongest baseline in our studies