Query Rewriting

Abstract

It is well known that there is a lexical chasm between web documents and user queries. As a result, even when the queries can fully capture users’ information needs, the search engines could not retrieve relevant web documents to match these queries. Query rewriting aims to bridge this gap by rewriting a given query to alternative queries such that the mismatches can be reduced and the relevance performance can be improved. Query rewriting has been extensively studied and recent advances from deep learning have further fostered this research field. In this chapter, we give an overview about the achievements that have been made on query rewriting. In particular, we review representative algorithms with both shallow and deep architectures.