A New Model for Measuring Similarity of Web Queries and Its Application in Query Expansion1

The similarity of web queries plays an important role in capturing frequently asked questions, most popular topics of search engine or automatic query expansion. Accurate measurement of similarity between queries is crucial. The paper presents a new model for similarity metric of web queries using user logs and applied it into information retrieval for query expansion. Different from previous works, in the new model not only word form, but also semantic information has been taken into account. Experiments show that using the new model in query expansion actually improved recall of 8.1 percent and precision of 9.2 percent, which indicates the good performance.