A Graph-based approach for text query expansion using pseudo relevance feedback and association rules mining

Abstract

Pseudo-relevance feedback is a query expansion approach whose terms are selected from a set of top ranked retrieved documents in response to the original query.  However, the selected terms will not be related to the query if the top retrieved documents are irrelevant. As a result, retrieval performance for the expanded query is not improved, compared to the original one. This paper suggests the use of documents selected using Pseudo Relevance Feedback for generating association rules. Thus, an algorithm based on dominance relations is applied. Then the strong correlations between query and other terms are detected, and an oriented and weighted graph called Pseudo-Graph Feedback is constructed. This graph serves for expanding original queries by terms related semantically and selected by the user. The results of the experiments on Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) collection are very significant, and best results are achieved by the proposed approach compared to both the baseline system and an existing technique.