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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2257–2260Cite as

Query Expansion Models

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Synonyms

Term expansion models

Definition

In information retrieval, the query expansion models are the techniques, algorithms or methodologies that reformulate the original query by adding new terms into the query, in order to achieve a better retrieval effectiveness.

Historical Background

The idea of expanding a query to achieve better retrieval performance emerged around the early 1970’s. A classical query expansion algorithm is Rocchio’s relevance feedback technique proposed in 1971 [10] for the Smart retrieval system. Since then, many different query expansion techniques and algorithms have been proposed.

Foundations

Query expansion models can be classed into three categories: manual, automatic, and interactive. Manual query expansion relies on searcher’s knowledge and experience in selecting appropriate terms to add to the query. Automatic query expansion weights candidate terms for expansion by processing the documents returned from the first-pass retrieval, and expands the...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Ben He

Authors
  1. Ben He
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Professor, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU

  2. Professor and Director, University Research Chair, Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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He, B. (2009). Query Expansion Models. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_926

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