A Case For Shorter Queries, and Helping Users Create Them

Information retrieval systems are frequently required to handle long queries. Simply using all terms in the query or relying on the underlying retrieval model to appropriately weight terms often leads to ineffective retrieval. We show that rewriting the query to a version that comprises a small subset of appropriate terms from the original query greatly improves effectiveness. Targeting a demonstrated potential improvement of almost 50% on some difficult TREC queries and their associated collections, we develop a suite of automatic techniques to re-write queries and study their characteristics. We show that the shortcomings of automatic methods can be ameliorated by some simple user interaction, and report results that are on average 25% better than the baseline.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Giridhar Kumaran, James Allan
• Keywords: Computational Linguistics, Difficult Trec Queries, Ineffective Retrieval, Information Retrieval Systems, NAACL 2007