An Ensemble Approach for Expanding Queries

Abstract

In our TREC participation, we used an ensemble approach in query expansion. Query expansion, such as synonym expansion, had shown promising results in medical literature search. On the other hand, some of the 2011 papers reported worse results from expansion. Since there are multiple knowledge sources available and each resource has clear strengths and weaknesses, we tested the combination of three expansion methods versus each individual method. We found that the ensemble approach performed better (in terms of average infAP, infNDCG, R-prec, and P10) than the individual methods and better than the Lucene baseline. The individual expansion methods, however, did not improve the baseline Lucene performance. We also performed an unofficial run using a concept index to boost the query performance, which led to small improvements in infAP, infNDCG, and R-prec.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA579309

Entities

People

  • Doug Redd
  • Duy Bui
  • Qing Zeng-treitler
  • Thomas Rindflesch

Organizations

  • University of Utah

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Diseases And Disorders
  • Filtration
  • Frequency
  • Health Care
  • Health Services
  • Hepatitis
  • Kidney Diseases
  • Nervous System
  • Neuromuscular Diseases
  • Neuropathy
  • Peripheral Nervous System
  • Precision
  • Removal
  • Standards
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Tooth Diseases
  • Word Lists

Readers

  • Economics
  • Information Retrieval
  • Materials Science