A Re-examination of Query Expansion Using Lexical Resources

Query expansion is an effective technique to improve the performance of information retrieval systems. Although hand-crafted lexical resources, such as WordNet, could provide more reliable related terms, previous studies showed that query expansion using only WordNet leads to very limited performance improvement. One of the main challenges is how to assign appropriate weights to expanded terms. In this paper, we re-examine this problem using recently proposed axiomatic approaches and find that, with appropriate term weighting strategy, we are able to exploit the information from lexical resources to significantly improve the retrieval performance. Our empirical results on six TREC collections show that query expansion using only hand-crafted lexical resources leads to significant performance improvement. The performance can be further improved if the proposed method is combined with query expansion using co-occurrence-based resources.