Interactive and Automatic Query Expansion: A Comparative Study with an Application on Arabic

Abstract

Much attention has been paid to the relative effectiveness of Interactive Query Expansion (IQE) versus Automatic Query Expansion (AQE). This research has been shown that automatic query expansion (collection dependent) strategy gives better performance than no query expansion. The percentage of queries that are improved by AQE strategy is 57% with average precision equal to 43.2. Compared against AQE (collection dependent) strategy, IQE gives better average precision than AQE strategy. The percentage of queries that are improved by best IQE decision is 86% with average precision equal to 44.1. Evaluation process reveals that the value of n in AQE strategy that gave the optimal value of average precision for the whole query set is equal to one.