An Exploration of Query Term Deletion

Many search users fail to formulate queries that can well represent information needs. As a result, they often need to reformulate the queries in order to find satisfying results. Query term deletion is one of the commonly used strategies for query reformulation. In this paper, we study the problem in the context of TREC session track. We first show that the reformulated queries used in the session track would lead to less satisfying search results than the original queries, which suggets that the current simulation strategy used in the session track for term deletion might not be a good method. Moreover, we also examine the potential of query term deletion, propose two simple strategies that automatically select terms for deletion, and discuss why the simulation strategy for term deletion fails to reformulate better queries.