Interactive Query Expansion using Concept-Based Directions Finder Based on Wikipedia

Despite the advances in information retrieval the search engines still result in imprecise or poor results, mainly due to the quality of the query being submitted. The query formulation to express their information need has always been challenging for the users. In this paper, we have proposed an interactive query expansion methodology using Concept-Based Directions Finder (CBDF). The approach determines the directions in which the search can be continued by the user using Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) for a given query. The CBDF identifies the relevant terms with a corresponding label for each of the directions found, based on the content and link structure of Wikipedia. The relevant terms identified along with its label are suggested to the user for query expansion through the new visual interface proposed. The visual interface named as terms mapper, accepts the query, and displays the potential directions and a group of relevant terms along with the label for the direction chosen by the user. We evaluated the results of the proposed approach and the visual interfacefor the identified queries. The experimental result shows that the approach produces a good Mean Average Precision (MAP) for the queries chosen.