Effectiveness of query expansion in ranked-output document retrieval systems

Abstract

This paper reports an evaluation of three methods for the expansion of natural language queries in ranked-out put retrieval systems. The methods are based on term co-oc currence data, on Soundex codes, and on a string similarity measure. Searches for 110 queries in a database of 26,280 titles and abstracts suggest that there is no significant differ ence in retrieval effectiveness between any of these methods and unexpanded searches.