Hybrid query expansion model for text and microblog information retrieval

Query expansion (QE) is an important process in information retrieval applications that improves the user query and helps in retrieving relevant results. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid query expansion model (HQE) that investigates how external resources can be combined to association rules mining and used to enhance expansion terms generation and selection. The HQE model can be processed in different configurations, starting from methods based on association rules and combining it with external knowledge. The HQE model handles the two main phases of a QE process, namely: the candidate terms generation phase and the selection phase. We propose for the first phase, statistical, semantic and conceptual methods to generate new related terms for a given query. For the second phase, we introduce a similarity measure, ESAC, based on the Explicit Semantic Analysis that computes the relatedness between a query and the set of candidate terms. The performance of the proposed HQE model is evaluated within two experimental validations. The first one addresses the tweet search task proposed by TREC Microblog Track 2011 and an ad-hoc IR task related to the hard topics of the TREC Robust 2004. The second experimental validation concerns the tweet contextualization task organized by INEX 2014. Global results highlighted the effectiveness of our HQE model and of association rules mining for QE combined with external resources.