Wikipedia-based semantic query enrichment

Abstract

We deal, in this paper, with the short queries (containing one or two words) problem. Short queries have no sufficient information to express their semantics in a non ambiguous way. Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) approach for query expansion is useful in many Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. However, this approach does not work well in the case of very short queries. Therefore, we present instead of PRF a semantic query enrichment method based on Wikipedia. This method expands short queries by semantically related terms extracted from Wikipedia. Our experiments on cultural heritage corpora show significant improvement in the retrieval performance.