Refining Search Queries from Examples Using Boolean Expressions and Latent Semantic Analysis

This paper describes an algorithm whereby an initial, naïve user query to a search engine can be subsequently refined to improve both its recall and precision. This is achieved by manually classifying the documents retrieved by the original query into relevant and irrelevant categories, and then finding additional Boolean terms which successfully discriminate between these categories. Latent semantic analysis is used to weight the choice of these extra search terms to make the resulting queries more intuitive to users.