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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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_947
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