Automatic feedback using past queries

Abstract

The effect of using paat queries to improve automatic query expansion was examined in the TREC environment. Automatic feedback of documents identified from similar past queries was compared with standard top-document feedback and with no feedback. A new query similarity metric was used based on comparing result lists and using probability of relevance. Our top-document feedback method showed small improvements over no feedback method consistent with past studies. On recall-precision and average precision measures, past query feedback yielded performance superior to that of top-document feedback. The past query feedback method also lends itself to tunable thresholds such that better performance can be obtained by automatically deciding when, and when not, to apply the expansion. Automatic past-query feedback actually improved top document precision in this experiment.