A New Query Expansion Approach for Improving Web Search Ranking

Abstract

Information systems have come a long way in the 21st century, with search engines emerging as the most popular and well-known retrieval systems. Several techniques have been used by researchers to improve the retrieval of relevant results from search engines. One of the approaches employed for improving relevant feedback of a retrieval system is Query Expansion (QE). The challenge associated with this technique is how to select the most relevant terms for the expansion. In this research work, we propose a query expansion technique based on Azak & Deepak's WWQE model. Our extended WWQE technique adopts Candidate Expansion Terms selection with the use of in-links and out-links. The top two relevant Wikipedia articles from the user's initial search were found using a custom search engine over Wikipedia. Following that, we ranked further Wikipedia articles that are semantically connected to the top two Wikipedia articles based on cosine similarity using TF-IDF Vectorizer. The expansion terms were then taken from the top 5 document titles. The results of the evaluation of our methodology utilizing TREC query topics (126-175) revealed that the system with extended features gave ranked results that were 11% better than those from the system with unexpanded queries.