Query expansion with the minimum user feedback by transductive learning

Abstract

Query expansion techniques generally select new query terms from a set of top ranked documents. Although a user's manual judgment of those documents would much help to select good expansion terms, it is difficult to get enough feedback from users in practical situations. In this paper we propose a query expansion technique which performs well even if a user notifies just a relevant document and a non-relevant document. In order to tackle this specific condition, we introduce two refinements to a well-known query expansion technique. One is application of a transductive learning technique in order to increase relevant documents. The other is a modified parameter estimation method which laps the predictions by multiple learning trials and try to differentiate the importance of candidate terms for expansion in relevant documents. Experimental results show that our technique outperforms some traditional query expansion methods in several evaluation measures. © 2005 Association for Computational Linguistics.