Query change as relevance feedback in session search

Abstract

Session search is the Information Retrieval (IR) task that performs document retrieval for an entire session. During a session, users often change queries to explore and investigate the information needs. In this paper, we propose to use query change as a new form of relevance feedback for better session search. Evaluation conducted over TREC 2012 Session Track shows that query change is a highly effective form of feedback as compared with existing relevance feedback methods. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art relevance feedback methods for the TREC 2012 Session Track by a significant improvement of >25%.