Enhanced Web Document Retrieval Using Automatic Query Expansion

The ever growing popularity of the Internet as a source of information, coupled with the accompanying growth in the number of documents made available through the World Wide Web, is leading to an increasing demand for more efficient and accurate information retrieval tools. Numerous techniques have been proposed and tried for improving the effectiveness of searching the World Wide Web for documents relevant to a given topic of interest. The specification of appropriate keywords and phrases by the user is crucial for the successful execution of a query as measured by the relevance of documents retrieved. Lack of users’ knowledge on the search topic and their changing information needs often make it difficult for them to find suitable keywords or phrases for a query. This results in searches that fail to cover all likely aspects of the topic of interest. We describe a scheme that attempts to remedy this situation by automatically expanding the user query through the analysis of initially retrieved documents. Experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the query expansion scheme are presented.