Query recovery of short user queries: on query expansion with stopwords

User queries to search engines are observed to predominantly contain inflected content words but lack stopwords and capitalization. Thus, they often resemble natural language queries after case folding and stopword removal. Query recovery aims to generate a linguistically well-formed query from a given user query as input to provide natural language processing tasks and cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). The evaluation of query translation shows that translation scores (NIST and BLEU) decrease after case folding, stopword removal, and stemming. A baseline method for query recovery reconstructs capitalization and stopwords, which considerably increases translation scores and significantly increases mean average precision for a standard CLIR task. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.3 [INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL] Information Search and Retrieval—Query formulation, Search process General Terms: Experimentation, Performance, Measurement

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Johannes Leveling, Gareth J. F. Jones
• Keywords: Case Folding, Information Management, Query Recovery, SIGIR 2010, Stopword Removal