Towards construction of evaluation framework for query expansion

Abstract

Query expansion is an important technique for achieving higher retrieval performance. However, a good framework for evaluating this technique in isolation does not exist because the effect of query expansion depends on the quality of the initial query. Feature quantities that characterize the quality of the initial query are defined in this study. Correlations between these quantities and retrieval performance were analyzed using the NTCIR-4 web test collection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.