Sequential Query Expansion using Concept Graph

Abstract

Manually and automatically constructed concept graphs (or semantic networks), in which the nodes correspond to words or phrases and the typed edges designate semantic relationships between words and phrases, have been previously shown to be rich sources of effective latent concepts for query expansion. However, finding good expansion concepts for a given query in large and dense concept graphs is a challenging problem, since the number of candidate concepts that are related to query terms and phrases and need to be examined increases exponentially with the distance from the original query concepts. In this paper, we propose a two-stage feature-based method for sequential selection of the most effective concepts for query expansion from a concept graph. In the first stage, the proposed method weighs the concepts according to different types of computationally inexpensive features, including collection and concept graph statistics. In the second stage, a sequential concept selection algorithm utilizing more expensive features is applied to find the most effective expansion concepts at different distances from the original query concepts. Experiments on TREC datasets of different type indicate that the proposed method achieves significant improvement in retrieval accuracy over state-of-the-art methods for query expansion using concept graphs.