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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2986–2991Cite as

Query Expansion for Information Retrieval

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Synonyms

QE, Query enhancement; Term expansion

Definition

Query expansion (QE) is a process in Information Retrieval which consists of selecting and adding terms to the user’s query with the goal of minimizing query-document mismatch and thereby improving retrieval performance.

Historical Background

The work on query expansion following relevance feedback dates back to 1965, when Rocchio [1] formalized relevance feedback in the vector-space model. Early work on using collection-based term co-occurrence statistics to select query expansion terms was done by Spärck Jones [2] and van Rijsbergen [3].

Foundations

The central task of information retrieval (IR) is to find documents that satisfy the user’s information need. This is usually taken to mean finding documents or some parts of them, such as passages, which contain information that would help resolving the user’s information need. Therefore, at least in a more traditional sense, IR does not involve providing the user directly with...

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Recommended Reading

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  2. Spärck JK. Automatic keyword classification for information retrieval. London: Butterworths; 1971.

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  3. van Rijsbergen CJ. A theoretical basis for the use of co-occurrence data in information retrieval. J Doc. 1977;33(2):106–19.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Olga Vechtomova

Authors
  1. Olga Vechtomova
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Olga Vechtomova .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Library, Archival & Information Studies, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Edie Rasmussen

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Vechtomova, O. (2018). Query Expansion for Information Retrieval. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_947

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