Query expansion for sentence retrieval using pseudo relevance feedback and word embedding

Abstract

This study investigates the use of query expansion (QE) methods in sentence retrieval for non-factoid queries to address the query-document term mismatch problem. Two alternative QE approaches: i) pseudo relevance feedback (PRF), using Robertson term selection, and ii) word embeddings (WE) of query words, are explored. Experiments are carried out on the WebAP data set developed using the TREC GOV2 collection. Experimental results using P@10, NDCG@10 and MRR show that QE using PRF achieves a statistically significant improvement over baseline retrieval models, but that while WE also improves over the baseline, this is not statistically significant. A method combining PRF and WE expansion performs consistently better than using only the PRF method.