The effect of lexical relationships on the quality of query clusters

• Main Authors: Goh, Dion Hoe-Lian, Ray, Chandrani Sinha, Foo, Schubert
• Other Authors: Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information storage and retrieval
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/91554; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/6111
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Query clustering is a useful technique that can help users frame an optimum query to obtain relevant documents. The content-based approach to query clustering has been criticized since queries are usually very short and consist of a wide variety of keywords, making this method ineffective in finding clusters. Clustering based on similar search results URLs has also performed inadequately due to the large number of distinct URLs. Our previous work has demonstrated that a hybrid approach combining the two is effective in generating good clusters. The present study aims to extend our work by using lexical knowledge from WordNet to examine the effect on the quality of query clusters as opposed to the other approaches. Our results show that surprisingly, the use of lexical knowledge does not produce any significant improvement in the quality of query clusters, thus demonstrating the robustness of the hybrid content-based plus search results-based query clustering approach.