A Query Expansion Technique using the EWC Semantic Relatedness Measure

This paper analyses the efficiency of the EWC semantic relatedness measure in an ad-hoc retrieval task. This measure combines the Wikipedia-based Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) measure, the WordNet path measure and the mixed collocation index. EWC considers encyclopaedic, ontological, and collocational knowledge about terms. This advantage of EWC is a key factor to find precise terms for automatic query expansion. In the experiments, the open source search engine Terrier is utilised as a tool to index and retrieve data. The proposed technique is tested on the NTCIR data collection. The experiments demonstrated superiority of EWC over ESA.