Query expansion using term relationships in language models for information retrieval.

Bai, Jing; Song, Dawei; Bruza, Peter; Nie, Jian-Yun; Cao, Guihong

Abstract

Language Modeling (LM) has been successfully applied to Information Retrieval (IR). However, most of the existing LM approaches only rely on term occurrences in documents, queries and document collections. In traditional unigram based models, terms (or words) are usually considered to be independent. In some recent studies, dependence models have been proposed to incorporate term relationships into LM, so that links can be created between words in the same sentence, and term relationships (e.g. synonymy) can be used to expand the document model. In this study, we further extend this family of dependence models in the following two ways: (1) Term relationships are used to expand query model instead of document model, so that query expansion process can be naturally implemented; (2) We exploit more sophisticated inferential relationships extracted with Information Flow (IF). Information flow relationships are not simply pairwise term relationships as those used in previous studies, but are between a set of terms and another term. They allow for context-dependent query expansion. Our experiments conducted on TREC collections show that we can obtain large and significant improvements with our approach. This study shows that LM is an appropriate framework to implement effective query expansion.

Citation

BAI, J., SONG, D., BRUZA, P., NIE, J.-Y. and CAO, G. 2005. Query expansion using term relationships in language models for information retrieval. In Proceedings of the 14th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) international conference on information and knowledge management (CIKM'05), 31 October - 5 November 2005, Bremen, Germany. New York: ACM [online], pages 688-695. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/1099554.1099725

• Conference Name: 14th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) international conference on information and knowledge management (CIKM'05)
• Conference Location: Bremen, Germany
• Start Date: Oct 31, 2005
• End Date: Nov 5, 2005
• Acceptance Date: Oct 31, 2005
• Online Publication Date: Oct 31, 2005
• Publication Date: Oct 31, 2005
• Deposit Date: May 21, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: May 21, 2009
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 688-695
• ISBN: 1595931406; 9781595931405
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1099554.1099725
• Keywords: Language model; Term relationships; Information flow; Query expansion
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/341