The Effect of Lexical Relationships on the Quality of Query Clusters

Query clustering helps users frame an optimum query to obtain relevant documents. The contentbased approach to query clustering has been criticized since queries are usually very short and consist of a wide variety of keywords, making this method ineffective in finding clusters. Clustering based on similar search results URLs has also performed inadequately due to the large number of distinct URLs. Our previous work has demonstrated that a hybrid approach combining the two is effective in generating good clusters. This study aims to extend our work by using lexical knowledge from WordNet to examine the effect on the quality of query clusters. Our results show that surprisingly, the use of lexical knowledge does not produce any significant improvement in quality, thus demonstrating the robustness of the hybrid clustering approach.