A term dependency-based approach for query terms ranking

Abstract

Formulating appropriate and effective queries has been regarded as a challenging issue, since a large number of candidate words or phrases could be chosen as query terms to convey users' information needs. In this paper, we propose an approach to rank a set of given query terms according their effectiveness, wherein top ranked terms will be selected as an effective query. Our ranking approach exploits and benefits from the underlying relationship between the query terms, and thereby the effective terms can be properly combined into the query. Two regression models which capture a rich set of linguistic and statistical properties are used in our approach. Experiments on NTCIR-4 ad-hoc retrieval tasks demonstrate that the proposed approach can significantly improve retrieval performance, and can be well applied to other problems such as query expansion and querying by text segments.