Simple questions to improve pseudo-relevance feedback results

Abstract

We explore interactive methods to further improve the performance of pseudo-relevance feedback. Studies \citeria suggest that new methods for tackling difficult queries are required. Our approach is to gather more information about the query from the user by asking her simple questions. The equally simple responses are used to modify the original query. Our experiments using the TREC Robust Track queries show that we can obtain a significant improvement in mean average precision averaging around 5% over pseudo-relevance feedback. This improvement is also spread across more queries compared to ordinary pseudo-relevance feedback, as suggested by geometric mean average precision.