Improving the retrieval effectiveness of very short queries

摘要

This paper describes an automatic approach designed to improve the retrieval effectiveness of very short queries such as those used in web searching. The method is based on the observation that stemming, which is designed to maximize recall, often results in depressed precision. Our approach is based on pseudo-feedback and attempts to increase the number of relevant documents in the pseudo-relevant set by reranking those documents based on the presence of unstemmed query terms in the document text. The original experiments underlying this work were carried out using Smart 11.0 and the lnc.ltc weighting scheme on three sets of documents from the TREC collection with corresponding TREC (title only) topics as queries. (The average length of these queries after stoplisting ranges from 2.4 to 4.5 terms.) Results, evaluated in terms of P@20 and non-interpolated average precision, showed clearly that pseudo-feedback (PF) based on this approach was effective in increasing the number of relevant documents in the top ranks. Subsequent experiments, performed on the same data sets using Smart 13.0 and the improved Lnu.ltu weighting scheme, indicate that these results hold up even over the much higher baseline provided by the new weights. Query drift analysis presents a more detailed picture of the improvements produced by this process.