Quantify query ambiguity using ODP metadata

Abstract

Query ambiguity prevents existing retrieval systems from returning reasonable results for every query. As there is already lots of work done on resolving ambiguity, vague queries could be handled using corresponding approaches separately if they can be identified in advance. Quantification of the degree of (lack of) ambiguity laysthe groundwork for the identification. In this poster, we propose such a measure using query topics based on the topic structure selected from the Open Directory Project (ODP) taxonomy. We introduce clarity score to quantify the lack of ambiguity with respect to data sets constructed from the TREC collections and the rank correlation test results demonstrate a strong positive association between the clarity scores and retrieval precisions for queries.