Effects of Topic Familiarity on Query Reformulation Strategies
Debanjan Ghosh · 2016
Users employ various Query Reformulation (QR) Strategies to improve their search experiences as well as to retrieve the better results. In this exploratory research, we investigate the association of topic familiarities with such QR strategies. We design a user study where 38 participants with different levels of Topic Familiarity (TF) took part in the TREC Genomics Search Track (a total of five search tasks). We conducted two experiments: 1) we evaluate a set of predefined QR strategies to discover if participants with a specific level of TF tends to use a specific QR strategy. 2) we propose a supervised classification system that classifies consecutive queries made by the participants with different levels (low, medium, and high) of topic familiarity. Various lexical and distributional semantic features are implemented and feature analysis shows that participants with low familiarity tend to alter the spelling and use stemming for QR whereas participants with medium or higher familiarity are inclined to add new terms and phrases to reformulate queries.