Inferring query aspects from reformulations using clustering

Abstract

When the information need is not clear from the user query, a good strategy would be to return documents that cover as many aspects of the query as possible. To do this, the possible aspects of the query need to be automatically identified. In this paper, we propose to do this by clustering reformulated queries generated from publicly available resources and using each cluster to represent an aspect of the query. Our results show that the automatically generated reformulations for the TREC Web Track queries match up quite well with actual sub-topics of these queries identified by TREC experts. Moreover, agglomerative clustering using query-to-query similarity based on co-occurrence in text passages can provide clusters of high quality that potentially can be used to identify aspects.