Term associations in query expansion : a structural linguistic perspective
Michael Edward Symonds, Guido Zuccon, Bevan Koopman, Peter Bruza, Laurianne Sitbon · QUT ePrints (Queensland University of Technology) · 2013
Many successful query expansion techniques ignore informa-tion about the term dependencies that exist within natural language. However, researchers have recently demonstrated that consistent and significant improvements in retrieval ef-fectiveness can be achieved by explicitly modelling term de-pendencies within the query expansion process. This has created an increased interest in dependency-based models. State-of-the-art dependency-based approaches primarily model term associations known within structural linguistics as syntagmatic associations, which are formed when terms co-occur together more often than by chance. However, structural linguistics proposes that the meaning of a word is also dependent on its paradigmatic associations, which are formed between words that can substitute for each other without effecting the acceptability of a sentence. Given the reliance on word meanings when a user formulates their query, our approach takes the novel step of modelling both syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations within the query expansion process based on the (pseudo) relevant documents returned in web search. The results demonstrate that this approach can provide significant improvements in web re-trieval effectiveness when compared to a strong benchmark retrieval system.