Text Mining Based Query Expansion for Chinese IR

Query expansion has long been suggested as a technique for dealing with word mismatch problem in information retrieval. In this paper, we describe a novel query expansion method which incorporates text mining techniques into query expansion for improving Chinese information retrieval performance. Unlike most of the existing query expansion strategies which generally select indexing terms from the top N retrieved documents and use them to expand the query, in our proposed method, we apply text mining techniques to find patterns from the retrieved documents which contain relevant terms to the query terms, then use these relevant terms which can be indexing terms or indexing term patterns to expand the query. The experiment with NTCIR-5 collection shows apparent improvement in both precision and recall.