Context query in information retrieval

Abstract

There is an important query requirement missing for search engines. With the wide variation of domain knowledge and user interest, a user would like to retrieve documents in which one query term is discussed in the context of another. Based on existing query mechanisms, what can be specified at most is the co-occurrence of multiple terms in a query. This is insufficient because the co-occurrence of two terms does not necessarily mean that one is discussed in the context of the other. In this paper we propose the context query for Web searching. A new query operator, called the 'in' operator, is used to specify context inclusion between two terms. Heuristic rules to identify context inclusion are suggested and implementation of the 'in' operator in search engines is proposed. Results show that both the precision and ranking relevance of Web searching are improved significantly.