Synonyms
Query assistance; Query Expansion Models; Query reformulation; Query suggestion
Definition
Query rewriting in Web search refers to the process of reformulating an original input query to a new query in order to achieve better search results. Reformulation includes but not limited to the following:
- 1.
Adding additional terms to express the search intent more accurately
- 2.
Deleting redundant terms or re-weighting the terms in the original query to emphasize important terms
- 3.
Finding alternative morphological forms of words by stemming each word, and searching for the alternative forms as well
- 4.
Finding synonyms of words, and searching for the synonyms as well
- 5.
Fixing spelling errors and automatically searching for the corrected form or suggesting it in the results
Historical Background
Web search queries are the words users type into web search engines to express their information need. These queries are typically 2–3 words long [7]. Traditional information retrieval allows...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Recommended Reading
Anick P. Using terminological feedback for Web search refinement – a log-based study. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2003. p. 88–95.
Brill E, Moore RC. An improved error model for noisy channel spelling correction. In: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics; 2000. p. 86–293.
Croft WB, Harper DJ. Using probabilistic models of document retrieval without relevance information. J Doc. 1979;35(4):285–95.
Cucerzan S, Brill E. Spelling correction as an iterative process that exploits the collective knowledge of Web users. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing; 2004. p. 293–300.
Cui H, Wen JR, Nie JY, Ma WY. Probabilistic query expansion using query logs. In: Proceedings of the 11th International World Wide Web Conference; 2002. p. 325–32.
Fonseca BM, Golgher P, Pssas B, Ribeiro-Neto B, Ziviani N. Concept-based interactive query expansion. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management; 2008. p. 696–703.
Jansen BJ, Spink A, Saracevic T. Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web. Inf Process Manag Int J. 2000;36(2):207–27.
Joachims T, Granka L, Pang B, Hembrooke H, Gay G. Accurately interpreting clickthrough data as implicit feedback. In: Proceedings of the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2005. p. 154–61.
Jones R, Fain D. Query word deletion prediction. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2003 p. 435–6.
Jones R, Rey B, Madani O, Greiner W. Generating query substitutions. In: Proceedings of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference; 2006. p. 387–96.
Lovins JB. Development of a stemming algorithm. Mech Transl Comput Ling. 1968;11(1–2):22–31.
Peng F, Ahmed N, Li X, Lu Y. Context sensitive stemming for Web search. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2007. p. 639–46.
Porter MF. An algorithm for suffix stripping. Program. 1980;14(3):130–7.
Qiu Y, Frei HP. Concept based query expansion. In: Proceedings of the 16th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1993. p. 160–9.
Tan B, Peng F. Unsupervised query segmentation using generative language models and wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference; 2008. p. 347–56.
Wei X, Peng F, Dumoulin B. Analyzing Web text association to disambiguate abbreviation in queries. In: Proceedings of the 34th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2008. p. 751–2.
Xu J, Croft B. Query expansion using local and global document analysis. In: Proceedings of the 19th Annual Internatioanl ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1996. p. 4–11.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Jones, R., Peng, F. (2018). Web Search Query Rewriting. 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_461
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_461
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8266-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8265-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering