Query Expansion Based on Word Graphs Using Pseudo Non-Relevant Documents and Term Proximity

In this paper, we propose a query expansion method based on word graphs using pseudo-relevant and pseudo non-relevant documents to achieve performance improvement in information retrieval. The initially retrieved documents are classified into a core cluster when a document includes core query terms extracted by query term combinations and the degree of query term proximity. Otherwise, documents are classified into a non-core cluster. The documents that belong to a core query cluster can be seen as pseudo-relevant documents, and the documents that belong to a non-core cluster can be seen as pseudo non-relevant documents. Each cluster is represented as a graph which has nodes and edges. Each node represents a term and each edge represents proximity between the term and a query term. The term weight is calculated by subtracting the term weight in the non-core cluster graph from the term weight in the core cluster graph. It means that a term with a high weight in a non-core cluster graph should not be considered as an expanded term. Expansion terms are selected according to the term weights. Experimental results on TREC WT10g test collection show that the proposed method achieves 9.4% improvement over the language model in mean average precision.