Query expansion based on conceptual and contextual term relationships in Wikipedia

Abstract

The dramatic increase in information on the World Wide Web makes it more difficult for web users using web search engines to effectively satisfy their information needs The users' lack of knowledge regarding the searched topics creates a complicated problem when formulating an effective query. Query expansion can play an essential role in overcoming such a deficit. However, because they lack sufficient knowledge about the searched topics, users sometimes find it difficult to evaluate the relatedness of the system's automatically expanded terms. This problem arises mostly in domain-specific areas, e.g Social Science. In this paper, we expand the queries based on a structured, open knowledge resource on the Web (Wikipedia). We link the entities from a domain-specific corpus (qualitative journals in social science) to Wikipedia entities. With Wikipedia serving as background knowledge, we help users with their selections by providing the most likely related terms. Furthermore, users are provided with contextual information that describes each expanded term in order to give users a clearer idea about the meaning of each expanded term. By utilizing 10 test queries chosen by experts who also evaluated the results, we compared the results of using Wikipedia with the results achieved by using a qualitative journal (author's abstract)