Domain dependent query reformulation for web search

Abstract

Query reformulation has been studied as a domain independent task. Existing work attempts to expand a query or substitute its terms with the same set of candidates regardless of the domain of this query. Since terms might be semantically related in one domain but not in others, it is more effective to provide candidates for queries with respect to their domain. This paper demonstrates the advantage of this domain dependent query reformulation approach, which learns its candidates, using a standard technique, for each domain from a separate sample of data derived automatically from a generic query log. Our results show that our approach statistically significantly outperforms the domain independent approach, which learns to reformulate from the same log using the same technique, on a large query set consisting of both health and commerce queries. Our results have very practical interpretation: while building different reformulation systems to handle queries from different domains does not require additional manual effort, it provides substantially better retrieval effectiveness than having a single system handling all queries. Additionally, we show that leveraging domain specific manually labelled data leads to further improvement.