Hyperlink-extended pseudo relevance feedback for improved microblog retrieval

Microblog retrieval has received much attention in recent years due to the wide spread of social microblogging platforms such as Twitter. Many research studies investigated different approaches for microblog retrieval. Query expansion is one of the approaches that showed stable performance for improving microblog retrieval effectiveness. In this paper we comprehensively investigate query expansion for microblog retrieval using pseudo relevance feedback (PRF) with different configurations. In addition, we propose a hyperlink-extended PRF by expanding queries using embedded hyperlinks in retrieved microblogs. Our experimental results on TREC microblog data showed that PRF alone could outperform many retrieval approaches if configured properly. Results also showed that utilizing hyperlinked documents in tweets for query expansion improves results over traditional PRF. Our best results achieved using hyperlink-extended PRF outperformed most of the reported results using other approaches.