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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2254–2257Cite as

Query Expansion for Information Retrieval

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Synonyms

QE, Query enhancement; Term expansion

Definition

Query expansion (QE) is a process in Information Retrieval which consists of selecting and adding terms to the user’s query with the goal of minimizing query-document mismatch and thereby improving retrieval performance.

Historical Background

The work on query expansion following relevance feedback dates back to 1965, when Rocchio [9] formalized relevance feedback in the vector-space model. Early work on using collection-based term co-occurrence statistics to select query expansion terms was done by Spärck Jones [10] and van Rijsbergen [12].

Foundations

The central task of information retrieval (IR) is to find documents that satisfy the user's information need. This is usually taken to mean finding documents or some parts of them, such as passages, which contain information that would help resolving the user’s information need. Therefore, at least in a more traditional sense, IR does not involve providing the user directly with...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Beaulieu, M. Experiments with interfaces to support query expansion. J. Doc. 53(1):8–19, 1997.

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  2. Billerbeck B. and Zobel J. Questioning query expansion: an examination of behaviour and parameters. In Proc. 15th Australasian Database Conf., 2004, pp. 69–76.

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  3. Carpineto C., de Mori R., Romano G., and Bigi B. An information-theoretic approach to automatic query expansion. ACM Trans. Information Syst., 19(1):1–27, 2001.

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  4. Jing Y. and Croft B. An association thesaurus for information retrieval. In Proc. 4th Int. Conf. Computer-Assist IR. “Recherche d'Information Assistée par Ordinateur”, pp. 146–160.

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  5. Kim M-C. and Choi K-S. A comparison of collocation-based similarity measures in query expansion. Inf. Proc. & Man., 35, 19–30, 1999.

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  6. Koenemann J. and Belkin N.J. A case for interaction: a study of interactive information retrieval behavior and effectiveness. In Proc. SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1996, pp. 205–212.

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  7. Qiu Y. and Frei H.P. Concept based query expansion. In Proc. 16th Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 1993, pp. 160–169.

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  8. Ruthven I. Re-examining the potential effectiveness of interactive query expansion. In Proc. 26th Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2003, pp. 213–220.

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  9. Salton G. The SMART retrieval system (Chapter 14). Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ. (Reprinted from Rocchio J.J. (1965). Relevance feedback in information retrieval. In Scientific Report ISR-9, Harvard University), 1971.

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  10. Spärck Jones K. Automatic keyword classification for information retrieval. Butterworths, London, 1971.

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  11. Spärck Jones K., Walker S., and Robertson S.E. A probabilistic model of information retrieval: development and comparative experiments. Inf. Proc. & Man., 36(6):779–808 2000.(Part 1); 809–840 (Part 2),

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  12. van Rijsbergen C.J. A theoretical basis for the use of co-occurrence data in information retrieval. J. Doc., 33,(2):106–119,June 1977,

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  13. Voorhees E. Query expansion using lexical-semantic relations. In Proc. 17th Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 1994, pp. 61–69.

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  14. Xu J. and Croft B. Query expansion using local and global document analysis. In Proc. 19th Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 1996, pp. 4–11.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Olga Vechtomova

Authors
  1. Olga Vechtomova
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

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

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. 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 (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Vechtomova, O. (2009). Query Expansion for Information Retrieval. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_947

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