Towards interactive query expansion

Abstract

In an era of online retrieval, it is appropriate to offer guidance to users wishing to improve their initial queries. One form of such guidance could be short lists of suggested terms gathered from feedback, nearest neighbors, and term variants of original query terms. To verify this approach, a series of experiments were run using the Cranfield test collection to discover techniques to select terms for these lists that would be effective for further retrieval. The results show that significant improvement can be expected from this approach to query expansion.