Discovering relevant features for effective query formulation

Abstract

The quality of discovered features in relevance feedback (RF) is the key issue for effective search query. Most existing feedback methods do not carefully address the issue of selecting features for noise reduction. As a result, exracted noisy features can easily contribute to undesirable effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction method for query formulation. This method first extract term association patterns in RF as knowledge for feature extraction. Negative RF is then used to improve the quality of the discovered knowledge. A novel information filtering (IF) model is developed to evaluate the proposed method. The experimental results conducted on Reuters Corpus Volume 1 and TREC topics confirm that the proposed model achieved encouraging performance compared to state-of-the-art IF models. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.