Improving query precision using semantic expansion

Query Expansion (QE) is one of the most important mechanisms in the information retrieval field. A typical short Internet query will go through a process of refinement to improve its retrieval power. Most of the existing QE techniques suffer from retrieval performance degradation due to imprecise choice of query’s additive terms in the QE process. In this paper, we introduce a novel automated QE mechanism. The new expansion process is guided by the semantics relations between the original query and the expanding words, in the context of the utilized corpus. Experimental results of our ‘‘controlled’’ query expansion, using the Arabic TREC-10 data, show a significant enhancement of recall and precision over current existing mechanisms in the field. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.