A user-centered approach for evaluating query expansion methods

Search engines are powerful tools to find information on the Web. However, they commonly return many irrelevant documents when the users´ queries are not specific enough. To refine the scope of their searches, refinement terms are sometimes recommended to the users by query expansion systems (QES). A recent wide-scale survey has shown that users seldom include these terms in their queries. In this article, we propose a new user-centric approach for evaluating QES. The purpose of our approach is to assess the suggestive power of the suggested terms. Several existing QES are compared following the proposed criteria.