Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
DRAFT! © April 1, 2009 Cambridge University Press. Feedback welcome. 177
9 Relevance feedback and query
expansion
In most collections, the same concept may be referred to using different
words. This issue, known as synonymy, has an impact on the recall of mostSYNONYMY
information retrieval systems. For example, you would want a search for
aircraft to match plane (but only for references to an airplane, not a woodworking
plane), and for a search on thermodynamics to match references to heat in
appropriate discussions. Users often attempt to address this problem themselves
by manually refining a query, as was discussed in Section 1.4; in this
chapter we discuss ways in which a system can help with query refinement,
either fully automatically or with the user in the loop.
The methods for tackling this problem split into two major classes: global
methods and local methods. Global methods are techniques for expanding
or reformulating query terms independent of the query and results returned
from it, so that changes in the query wording will cause the new query to
match other semantically similar terms. Global methods include:
• Query expansion/reformulation with a thesaurus or WordNet (Section 9.2.2)
• Query expansion via automatic thesaurus generation (Section 9.2.3)
• Techniques like spelling correction (discussed in Chapter 3)
Local methods adjust a query relative to the documents that initially appear
to match the query. The basic methods here are:
• Relevance feedback (Section 9.1)
• Pseudo relevance feedback, also known as Blind relevance feedback (Section
9.1.6)
• (Global) indirect relevance feedback (Section 9.1.7)
In this chapter, we will mention all of these approaches, but we will concentrate
on relevance feedback, which is one of the most used and most successful
approaches.
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
178 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion
9.1 Relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback
The idea of relevance feedback (RF) is to involve the user in the retrieval processRELEVANCE FEEDBACK
so as to improve the final result set. In particular, the user gives feedback on
the relevance of documents in an initial set of results. The basic procedure is:
• The user issues a (short, simple) query.
• The system returns an initial set of retrieval results.
• The user marks some returned documents as relevant or nonrelevant.
• The system computes a better representation of the information need based
on the user feedback.
• The system displays a revised set of retrieval results.
Relevance feedback can go through one or more iterations of this sort. The
process exploits the idea that it may be difficult to formulate a good query
when you don’t know the collection well, but it is easy to judge particular
documents, and so it makes sense to engage in iterative query refinement
of this sort. In such a scenario, relevance feedback can also be effective in
tracking a user’s evolving information need: seeing some documents may
lead users to refine their understanding of the information they are seeking.
Image search provides a good example of relevance feedback. Not only is
it easy to see the results at work, but this is a domain where a user can easily
have difficulty formulating what they want in words, but can easily indicate
relevant or nonrelevant images. After the user enters an initial query for bike
on the demonstration system at:
http://nayana.ece.ucsb.edu/imsearch/imsearch.html
the initial results (in this case, images) are returned. In Figure 9.1 (a), the
user has selected some of them as relevant. These will be used to refine the
query, while other displayed results have no effect on the reformulation. Figure
9.1 (b) then shows the new top-ranked results calculated after this round
of relevance feedback.
Figure 9.2 shows a textual IR example where the user wishes to find out
about new applications of space satellites.
9.1.1 The Rocchio algorithm for relevance feedback
The Rocchio Algorithm is the classic algorithm for implementing relevance
feedback. It models a way of incorporating relevance feedback information
into the vector space model of Section 6.3.
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
9.1 Relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback 179
(a)
(b)
◮ Figure 9.1 Relevance feedback searching over images. (a) The user views the
initial query results for a query of bike, selects the first, third and fourth result in
the top row and the fourth result in the bottom row as relevant, and submits this
feedback. (b) The users sees the revised result set. Precision is greatly improved.
From http://nayana.ece.ucsb.edu/imsearch/imsearch.html (Newsam et al. 2001).
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
180 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion
(a) Query: New space satellite applications
(b) + 1. 0.539, 08/13/91, NASA Hasn’t Scrapped Imaging Spectrometer
+ 2. 0.533, 07/09/91, NASA Scratches Environment Gear From Satellite
Plan
3. 0.528, 04/04/90, Science Panel Backs NASA Satellite Plan, But
Urges Launches of Smaller Probes
4. 0.526, 09/09/91, A NASA Satellite Project Accomplishes Incredible
Feat: Staying Within Budget
5. 0.525, 07/24/90, Scientist Who Exposed Global Warming Proposes
Satellites for Climate Research
6. 0.524, 08/22/90, Report Provides Support for the Critics Of Using
Big Satellites to Study Climate
7. 0.516, 04/13/87, Arianespace Receives Satellite Launch Pact
From Telesat Canada
+ 8. 0.509, 12/02/87, Telecommunications Tale of Two Companies
(c) 2.074 new 15.106 space
30.816 satellite 5.660 application
5.991 nasa 5.196 eos
4.196 launch 3.972 aster
3.516 instrument 3.446 arianespace
3.004 bundespost 2.806 ss
2.790 rocket 2.053 scientist
2.003 broadcast 1.172 earth
0.836 oil 0.646 measure
(d) * 1. 0.513, 07/09/91, NASA Scratches Environment Gear From Satellite
Plan
* 2. 0.500, 08/13/91, NASA Hasn’t Scrapped Imaging Spectrometer
3. 0.493, 08/07/89, When the Pentagon Launches a Secret Satellite,
Space Sleuths Do Some Spy Work of Their Own
4. 0.493, 07/31/89, NASA Uses ‘Warm’ Superconductors For Fast
Circuit
* 5. 0.492, 12/02/87, Telecommunications Tale of Two Companies
6. 0.491, 07/09/91, Soviets May Adapt Parts of SS-20 Missile For
Commercial Use
7. 0.490, 07/12/88, Gaping Gap: Pentagon Lags in Race To Match
the Soviets In Rocket Launchers
8. 0.490, 06/14/90, Rescue of Satellite By Space Agency To Cost $90
Million
◮ Figure 9.2 Example of relevance feedback on a text collection. (a) The initial query
(a). (b) The user marks some relevant documents (shown with a plus sign). (c) The
query is then expanded by 18 terms with weights as shown. (d) The revised top
results are then shown. A * marks the documents which were judged relevant in the
relevance feedback phase.
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9.1 Relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback 181
◮ Figure 9.3 The Rocchio optimal query for separating relevant and nonrelevant
documents.
The underlying theory. We want to find a query vector, denoted as q, that
maximizes similarity with relevant documents while minimizing similarity
with nonrelevant documents. If Cr is the set of relevant documents and Cnr
is the set of nonrelevant documents, then we wish to find:1
qopt = arg max
q
[sim(q, Cr) − sim(q, Cnr)],(9.1)
where sim is defined as in Equation 6.10. Under cosine similarity, the optimal
query vector qopt for separating the relevant and nonrelevant documents is:
qopt =
1
|Cr| ∑
dj∈Cr
dj −
1
|Cnr| ∑
dj∈Cnr
dj(9.2)
That is, the optimal query is the vector difference between the centroids of the
relevant and nonrelevant documents; see Figure 9.3. However, this observation
is not terribly useful, precisely because the full set of relevant documents
is not known: it is what we want to find.
The Rocchio (1971) algorithm. This was the relevance feedback mecha-ROCCHIO ALGORITHM
1. In the equation, arg maxx f (x) returns a value of x which maximizes the value of the function
f (x). Similarly, arg minx f (x) returns a value of x which minimizes the value of the function
f (x).
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
182 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion
◮ Figure 9.4 An application of Rocchio’s algorithm. Some documents have been
labeled as relevant and nonrelevant and the initial query vector is moved in response
to this feedback.
nism introduced in and popularized by Salton’s SMART system around 1970.
In a real IR query context, we have a user query and partial knowledge of
known relevant and nonrelevant documents. The algorithm proposes using
the modified query qm:
qm = αq0 + β
1
|Dr| ∑
dj∈Dr
dj − γ
1
|Dnr| ∑
dj∈Dnr
dj(9.3)
where q0 is the original query vector, Dr and Dnr are the set of known relevant
and nonrelevant documents respectively, and α, β, and γ are weights
attached to each term. These control the balance between trusting the judged
document set versus the query: if we have a lot of judged documents, we
would like a higher β and γ. Starting from q0, the new query moves you
some distance toward the centroid of the relevant documents and some distance
away from the centroid of the nonrelevant documents. This new query
can be used for retrieval in the standard vector space model (see Section 6.3).
We can easily leave the positive quadrant of the vector space by subtracting
off a nonrelevant document’s vector. In the Rocchio algorithm, negative term
weights are ignored. That is, the term weight is set to 0. Figure 9.4 shows the
effect of applying relevance feedback.
Relevance feedback can improve both recall and precision. But, in practice,
it has been shown to be most useful for increasing recall in situations
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9.1 Relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback 183
where recall is important. This is partly because the technique expands the
query, but it is also partly an effect of the use case: when they want high
recall, users can be expected to take time to review results and to iterate on
the search. Positive feedback also turns out to be much more valuable than
negative feedback, and so most IR systems set γ < β. Reasonable values
might be α = 1, β = 0.75, and γ = 0.15. In fact, many systems, such as
the image search system in Figure 9.1, allow only positive feedback, which
is equivalent to setting γ = 0. Another alternative is to use only the marked
nonrelevant document which received the highest ranking from the IR system
as negative feedback (here, |Dnr| = 1 in Equation (9.3)). While many of
the experimental results comparing various relevance feedback variants are
rather inconclusive, some studies have suggested that this variant, called IdeIDE DEC-HI
dec-hi is the most effective or at least the most consistent performer.
£ 9.1.2 Probabilistic relevance feedback
Rather than reweighting the query in a vector space, if a user has told us
some relevant and nonrelevant documents, then we can proceed to build a
classifier. One way of doing this is with a Naive Bayes probabilistic model.
If R is a Boolean indicator variable expressing the relevance of a document,
then we can estimate P(xt = 1|R), the probability of a term t appearing in a
document, depending on whether it is relevant or not, as:
ˆP(xt = 1|R = 1) = |VRt|/|VR|(9.4)
ˆP(xt = 1|R = 0) = (d ft − |VRt|)/(N − |VR|)
where N is the total number of documents, d ft is the number that contain
t, VR is the set of known relevant documents, and VRt is the subset of this
set containing t. Even though the set of known relevant documents is a perhaps
small subset of the true set of relevant documents, if we assume that
the set of relevant documents is a small subset of the set of all documents
then the estimates given above will be reasonable. This gives a basis for
another way of changing the query term weights. We will discuss such probabilistic
approaches more in Chapters 11 and 13, and in particular outline
the application to relevance feedback in Section 11.3.4 (page 228). For the
moment, observe that using just Equation (9.4) as a basis for term-weighting
is likely insufficient. The equations use only collection statistics and information
about the term distribution within the documents judged relevant.
They preserve no memory of the original query.
9.1.3 When does relevance feedback work?
The success of relevance feedback depends on certain assumptions. Firstly,
the user has to have sufficient knowledge to be able to make an initial query
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184 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion
which is at least somewhere close to the documents they desire. This is
needed anyhow for successful information retrieval in the basic case, but
it is important to see the kinds of problems that relevance feedback cannot
solve alone. Cases where relevance feedback alone is not sufficient include:
• Misspellings. If the user spells a term in a different way to the way it
is spelled in any document in the collection, then relevance feedback is
unlikely to be effective. This can be addressed by the spelling correction
techniques of Chapter 3.
• Cross-language information retrieval. Documents in another language
are not nearby in a vector space based on term distribution. Rather, documents
in the same language cluster more closely together.
• Mismatch of searcher’s vocabulary versus collection vocabulary. If the
user searches for laptop but all the documents use the term notebook computer,
then the query will fail, and relevance feedback is again most likely
ineffective.
Secondly, the relevance feedback approach requires relevant documents to
be similar to each other. That is, they should cluster. Ideally, the term distribution
in all relevant documents will be similar to that in the documents
marked by the users, while the term distribution in all nonrelevant documents
will be different from those in relevant documents. Things will work
well if all relevant documents are tightly clustered around a single prototype,
or, at least, if there are different prototypes, if the relevant documents
have significant vocabulary overlap, while similarities between relevant and
nonrelevant documents are small. Implicitly, the Rocchio relevance feedback
model treats relevant documents as a single cluster, which it models via the
centroid of the cluster. This approach does not work as well if the relevant
documents are a multimodal class, that is, they consist of several clusters of
documents within the vector space. This can happen with:
• Subsets of the documents using different vocabulary, such as Burma vs.
Myanmar
• A query for which the answer set is inherently disjunctive, such as Pop
stars who once worked at Burger King.
• Instances of a general concept, which often appear as a disjunction of
more specific concepts, for example, felines.
Good editorial content in the collection can often provide a solution to this
problem. For example, an article on the attitudes of different groups to the
situation in Burma could introduce the terminology used by different parties,
thus linking the document clusters.
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9.1 Relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback 185
Relevance feedback is not necessarily popular with users. Users are often
reluctant to provide explicit feedback, or in general do not wish to prolong
the search interaction. Furthermore, it is often harder to understand why a
particular document was retrieved after relevance feedback is applied.
Relevance feedback can also have practical problems. The long queries
that are generated by straightforward application of relevance feedback techniques
are inefficient for a typical IR system. This results in a high computing
cost for the retrieval and potentially long response times for the user. A partial
solution to this is to only reweight certain prominent terms in the relevant
documents, such as perhaps the top 20 terms by term frequency. Some experimental
results have also suggested that using a limited number of terms
like this may give better results (Harman 1992) though other work has suggested
that using more terms is better in terms of retrieved document quality
(Buckley et al. 1994b).
9.1.4 Relevance feedback on the web
Some web search engines offer a similar/related pages feature: the user indicates
a document in the results set as exemplary from the standpoint of
meeting his information need and requests more documents like it. This can
be viewed as a particular simple form of relevance feedback. However, in
general relevance feedback has been little used in web search. One exception
was the Excite web search engine, which initially provided full relevance
feedback. However, the feature was in time dropped, due to lack of use. On
the web, few people use advanced search interfaces and most would like to
complete their search in a single interaction. But the lack of uptake also probably
reflects two other factors: relevance feedback is hard to explain to the
average user, and relevance feedback is mainly a recall enhancing strategy,
and web search users are only rarely concerned with getting sufficient recall.
Spink et al. (2000) present results from the use of relevance feedback in
the Excite search engine. Only about 4% of user query sessions used the
relevance feedback option, and these were usually exploiting the “More like
this” link next to each result. About 70% of users only looked at the first
page of results and did not pursue things any further. For people who used
relevance feedback, results were improved about two thirds of the time.
An important more recent thread of work is the use of clickstream data
(what links a user clicks on) to provide indirect relevance feedback. Use
of this data is studied in detail in (Joachims 2002b, Joachims et al. 2005).
The very successful use of web link structure (see Chapter 21) can also be
viewed as implicit feedback, but provided by page authors rather than readers
(though in practice most authors are also readers).
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186 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion
? Exercise 9.1
In Rocchio’s algorithm, what weight setting for α/β/γ does a “Find pages like this
one” search correspond to?
Exercise 9.2 [⋆]
Give three reasons why relevance feedback has been little used in web search.
9.1.5 Evaluation of relevance feedback strategies
Interactive relevance feedback can give very substantial gains in retrieval
performance. Empirically, one round of relevance feedback is often very
useful. Two rounds is sometimes marginally more useful. Successful use of
relevance feedback requires enough judged documents, otherwise the process
is unstable in that it may drift away from the user’s information need.
Accordingly, having at least five judged documents is recommended.
There is some subtlety to evaluating the effectiveness of relevance feedback
in a sound and enlightening way. The obvious first strategy is to start
with an initial query q0 and to compute a precision-recall graph. Following
one round of feedback from the user, we compute the modified query qm
and again compute a precision-recall graph. Here, in both rounds we assess
performance over all documents in the collection, which makes comparisons
straightforward. If we do this, we find spectacular gains from relevance feedback:
gains on the order of 50% in mean average precision. But unfortunately
it is cheating. The gains are partly due to the fact that known relevant documents
(judged by the user) are now ranked higher. Fairness demands that
we should only evaluate with respect to documents not seen by the user.
A second idea is to use documents in the residual collection (the set of documents
minus those assessed relevant) for the second round of evaluation.
This seems like a more realistic evaluation. Unfortunately, the measured performance
can then often be lower than for the original query. This is particularly
the case if there are few relevant documents, and so a fair proportion
of them have been judged by the user in the first round. The relative performance
of variant relevance feedback methods can be validly compared,
but it is difficult to validly compare performance with and without relevance
feedback because the collection size and the number of relevant documents
changes from before the feedback to after it.
Thus neither of these methods is fully satisfactory. A third method is to
have two collections, one which is used for the initial query and relevance
judgments, and the second that is then used for comparative evaluation. The
performance of both q0 and qm can be validly compared on the second col-
lection.
Perhaps the best evaluation of the utility of relevance feedback is to do user
studies of its effectiveness, in particular by doing a time-based comparison:
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9.1 Relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback 187
Precision at k = 50
Term weighting no RF pseudo RF
lnc.ltc 64.2% 72.7%
Lnu.ltu 74.2% 87.0%
◮ Figure 9.5 Results showing pseudo relevance feedback greatly improving performance.
These results are taken from the Cornell SMART system at TREC 4 (Buckley
et al. 1995), and also contrast the use of two different length normalization schemes
(L vs. l); cf. Figure 6.15 (page 128). Pseudo relevance feedback consisted of adding 20
terms to each query.
how fast does a user find relevant documents with relevance feedback vs.
another strategy (such as query reformulation), or alternatively, how many
relevant documents does a user find in a certain amount of time. Such notions
of user utility are fairest and closest to real system usage.
9.1.6 Pseudo relevance feedback
Pseudo relevance feedback, also known as blind relevance feedback, provides aPSEUDO RELEVANCE
FEEDBACK
BLIND RELEVANCE
FEEDBACK
method for automatic local analysis. It automates the manual part of relevance
feedback, so that the user gets improved retrieval performance without
an extended interaction. The method is to do normal retrieval to find an
initial set of most relevant documents, to then assume that the top k ranked
documents are relevant, and finally to do relevance feedback as before under
this assumption.
This automatic technique mostly works. Evidence suggests that it tends
to work better than global analysis (Section 9.2). It has been found to improve
performance in the TREC ad hoc task. See for example the results in
Figure 9.5. But it is not without the dangers of an automatic process. For
example, if the query is about copper mines and the top several documents
are all about mines in Chile, then there may be query drift in the direction of
documents on Chile.
9.1.7 Indirect relevance feedback
We can also use indirect sources of evidence rather than explicit feedback on
relevance as the basis for relevance feedback. This is often called implicit (rel-IMPLICIT RELEVANCE
FEEDBACK evance) feedback. Implicit feedback is less reliable than explicit feedback, but is
more useful than pseudo relevance feedback, which contains no evidence of
user judgments. Moreover, while users are often reluctant to provide explicit
feedback, it is easy to collect implicit feedback in large quantities for a high
volume system, such as a web search engine.
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
188 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion
On the web, DirectHit introduced the idea of ranking more highly documents
that users chose to look at more often. In other words, clicks on links
were assumed to indicate that the page was likely relevant to the query. This
approach makes various assumptions, such as that the document summaries
displayed in results lists (on whose basis users choose which documents to
click on) are indicative of the relevance of these documents. In the original
DirectHit search engine, the data about the click rates on pages was gathered
globally, rather than being user or query specific. This is one form of the general
area of clickstream mining. Today, a closely related approach is used inCLICKSTREAM MINING
ranking the advertisements that match a web search query (Chapter 19).
9.1.8 Summary
Relevance feedback has been shown to be very effective at improving relevance
of results. Its successful use requires queries for which the set of relevant
documents is medium to large. Full relevance feedback is often onerous
for the user, and its implementation is not very efficient in most IR systems.
In many cases, other types of interactive retrieval may improve relevance by
about as much with less work.
Beyond the core ad hoc retrieval scenario, other uses of relevance feedback
include:
• Following a changing information need (e.g., names of car models of interest
change over time)
• Maintaining an information filter (e.g., for a news feed). Such filters are
discussed further in Chapter 13.
• Active learning (deciding which examples it is most useful to know the
class of to reduce annotation costs).
?
Exercise 9.3
Under what conditions would the modified query qm in Equation 9.3 be the same as
the original query q0? In all other cases, is qm closer than q0 to the centroid of the
relevant documents?
Exercise 9.4
Why is positive feedback likely to be more useful than negative feedback to an IR
system? Why might only using one nonrelevant document be more effective than
using several?
Exercise 9.5
Suppose that a user’s initial query is cheap CDs cheap DVDs extremely cheap CDs. The
user examines two documents, d1 and d2. She judges d1, with the content CDs cheap
software cheap CDs relevant and d2 with content cheap thrills DVDs nonrelevant. Assume
that we are using direct term frequency (with no scaling and no document
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
9.2 Global methods for query reformulation 189
frequency). There is no need to length-normalize vectors. Using Rocchio relevance
feedback as in Equation (9.3) what would the revised query vector be after relevance
feedback? Assume α = 1, β = 0.75, γ = 0.25.
Exercise 9.6 [⋆]
Omar has implemented a relevance feedback web search system, where he is going
to do relevance feedback based only on words in the title text returned for a page (for
efficiency). The user is going to rank 3 results. The first user, Jinxing, queries for:
banana slug
and the top three titles returned are:
banana slug Ariolimax columbianus
Santa Cruz mountains banana slug
Santa Cruz Campus Mascot
Jinxing judges the first two documents relevant, and the third nonrelevant. Assume
that Omar’s search engine uses term frequency but no length normalization nor IDF.
Assume that he is using the Rocchio relevance feedback mechanism, with α = β =
γ = 1. Show the final revised query that would be run. (Please list the vector elements
in alphabetical order.)
9.2 Global methods for query reformulation
In this section we more briefly discuss three global methods for expanding a
query: by simply aiding the user in doing so, by using a manual thesaurus,
and through building a thesaurus automatically.
9.2.1 Vocabulary tools for query reformulation
Various user supports in the search process can help the user see how their
searches are or are not working. This includes information about words that
were omitted from the query because they were on stop lists, what words
were stemmed to, the number of hits on each term or phrase, and whether
words were dynamically turned into phrases. The IR system might also suggest
search terms by means of a thesaurus or a controlled vocabulary. A user
can also be allowed to browse lists of the terms that are in the inverted index,
and thus find good terms that appear in the collection.
9.2.2 Query expansion
In relevance feedback, users give additional input on documents (by marking
documents in the results set as relevant or not), and this input is used
to reweight the terms in the query for documents. In query expansion on theQUERY EXPANSION
other hand, users give additional input on query words or phrases, possibly
suggesting additional query terms. Some search engines (especially on the
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
190 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion
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◮ Figure 9.6 An example of query expansion in the interface of the Yahoo! web
search engine in 2006. The expanded query suggestions appear just below the “Search
Results” bar.
web) suggest related queries in response to a query; the users then opt to use
one of these alternative query suggestions. Figure 9.6 shows an example of
query suggestion options being presented in the Yahoo! web search engine.
The central question in this form of query expansion is how to generate alternative
or expanded queries for the user. The most common form of query
expansion is global analysis, using some form of thesaurus. For each term
t in a query, the query can be automatically expanded with synonyms and
related words of t from the thesaurus. Use of a thesaurus can be combined
with ideas of term weighting: for instance, one might weight added terms
less than original query terms.
Methods for building a thesaurus for query expansion include:
• Use of a controlled vocabulary that is maintained by human editors. Here,
there is a canonical term for each concept. The subject headings of traditional
library subject indexes, such as the Library of Congress Subject
Headings, or the Dewey Decimal system are examples of a controlled
vocabulary. Use of a controlled vocabulary is quite common for wellresourced
domains. A well-known example is the Unified Medical Language
System (UMLS) used with MedLine for querying the biomedical
research literature. For example, in Figure 9.7, neoplasms was added to a
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
9.2 Global methods for query reformulation 191
• User query: cancer
• PubMed query: (“neoplasms”[TIAB] NOT Medline[SB]) OR “neoplasms”[MeSH
Terms] OR cancer[Text Word]
• User query: skin itch
• PubMed query: (“skin”[MeSH Terms] OR (“integumentary system”[TIAB] NOT
Medline[SB]) OR “integumentary system”[MeSH Terms] OR skin[Text Word]) AND
((“pruritus”[TIAB] NOT Medline[SB]) OR “pruritus”[MeSH Terms] OR itch[Text
Word])
◮ Figure 9.7 Examples of query expansion via the PubMed thesaurus. When a user
issues a query on the PubMed interface to Medline at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/,
their query is mapped on to the Medline vocabulary as shown.
search for cancer. This Medline query expansion also contrasts with the
Yahoo! example. The Yahoo! interface is a case of interactive query expansion,
whereas PubMed does automatic query expansion. Unless the user
chooses to examine the submitted query, they may not even realize that
query expansion has occurred.
• A manual thesaurus. Here, human editors have built up sets of synonymous
names for concepts, without designating a canonical term. The
UMLS metathesaurus is one example of a thesaurus. Statistics Canada
maintains a thesaurus of preferred terms, synonyms, broader terms, and
narrower terms for matters on which the government collects statistics,
such as goods and services. This thesaurus is also bilingual English and
French.
• An automatically derived thesaurus. Here, word co-occurrence statistics
over a collection of documents in a domain are used to automatically induce
a thesaurus; see Section 9.2.3.
• Query reformulations based on query log mining. Here, we exploit the
manual query reformulations of other users to make suggestions to a new
user. This requires a huge query volume, and is thus particularly appropriate
to web search.
Thesaurus-based query expansion has the advantage of not requiring any
user input. Use of query expansion generally increases recall and is widely
used in many science and engineering fields. As well as such global analysis
techniques, it is also possible to do query expansion by local analysis, for
instance, by analyzing the documents in the result set. User input is now
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
192 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion
Word Nearest neighbors
absolutely absurd, whatsoever, totally, exactly, nothing
bottomed dip, copper, drops, topped, slide, trimmed
captivating shimmer, stunningly, superbly, plucky, witty
doghouse dog, porch, crawling, beside, downstairs
makeup repellent, lotion, glossy, sunscreen, skin, gel
mediating reconciliation, negotiate, case, conciliation
keeping hoping, bring, wiping, could, some, would
lithographs drawings, Picasso, Dali, sculptures, Gauguin
pathogens toxins, bacteria, organisms, bacterial, parasite
senses grasp, psyche, truly, clumsy, naive, innate
◮ Figure 9.8 An example of an automatically generated thesaurus. This example
is based on the work in Schütze (1998), which employs latent semantic indexing (see
Chapter 18).
usually required, but a distinction remains as to whether the user is giving
feedback on documents or on query terms.
9.2.3 Automatic thesaurus generation
As an alternative to the cost of a manual thesaurus, we could attempt to
generate a thesaurus automatically by analyzing a collection of documents.
There are two main approaches. One is simply to exploit word cooccurrence.
We say that words co-occurring in a document or paragraph are likely to be
in some sense similar or related in meaning, and simply count text statistics
to find the most similar words. The other approach is to use a shallow grammatical
analysis of the text and to exploit grammatical relations or grammatical
dependencies. For example, we say that entities that are grown, cooked,
eaten, and digested, are more likely to be food items. Simply using word
cooccurrence is more robust (it cannot be misled by parser errors), but using
grammatical relations is more accurate.
The simplest way to compute a co-occurrence thesaurus is based on termterm
similarities. We begin with a term-document matrix A, where each cell
At,d is a weighted count wt,d for term t and document d, with weighting so
A has length-normalized rows. If we then calculate C = AAT, then Cu,v is
a similarity score between terms u and v, with a larger number being better.
Figure 9.8 shows an example of a thesaurus derived in basically this manner,
but with an extra step of dimensionality reduction via Latent Semantic Indexing,
which we discuss in Chapter 18. While some of the thesaurus terms
are good or at least suggestive, others are marginal or bad. The quality of the
associations is typically a problem. Term ambiguity easily introduces irrel-
Online edition (c) 2009 Cambridge UP
9.3 References and further reading 193
evant statistically correlated terms. For example, a query for Apple computer
may expand to Apple red fruit computer. In general these thesauri suffer from
both false positives and false negatives. Moreover, since the terms in the automatic
thesaurus are highly correlated in documents anyway (and often the
collection used to derive the thesaurus is the same as the one being indexed),
this form of query expansion may not retrieve many additional documents.
Query expansion is often effective in increasing recall. However, there is
a high cost to manually producing a thesaurus and then updating it for scientific
and terminological developments within a field. In general a domainspecific
thesaurus is required: general thesauri and dictionaries give far too
little coverage of the rich domain-particular vocabularies of most scientific
fields. However, query expansion may also significantly decrease precision,
particularly when the query contains ambiguous terms. For example, if the
user searches for interest rate, expanding the query to interest rate fascinate evaluate
is unlikely to be useful. Overall, query expansion is less successful than
relevance feedback, though it may be as good as pseudo relevance feedback.
It does, however, have the advantage of being much more understandable to
the system user.
? Exercise 9.7
If A is simply a Boolean cooccurrence matrix, then what do you get as the entries in
C?
9.3 References and further reading
Work in information retrieval quickly confronted the problem of variant expression
which meant that the words in a query might not appear in a document,
despite it being relevant to the query. An early experiment about
1960 cited by Swanson (1988) found that only 11 out of 23 documents properly
indexed under the subject toxicity had any use of a word containing the
stem toxi. There is also the issue of translation, of users knowing what terms
a document will use. Blair and Maron (1985) conclude that “it is impossibly
difficult for users to predict the exact words, word combinations, and phrases
that are used by all (or most) relevant documents and only (or primarily) by
those documents”.
The main initial papers on relevance feedback using vector space models
all appear in Salton (1971b), including the presentation of the Rocchio algorithm
(Rocchio 1971) and the Ide dec-hi variant along with evaluation of
several variants (Ide 1971). Another variant is to regard all documents in
the collection apart from those judged relevant as nonrelevant, rather than
only ones that are explicitly judged nonrelevant. However, Schütze et al.
(1995) and Singhal et al. (1997) show that better results are obtained for routing
by using only documents close to the query of interest rather than all
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194 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion
documents. Other later work includes Salton and Buckley (1990), Riezler
et al. (2007) (a statistical NLP approach to RF) and the recent survey paper
Ruthven and Lalmas (2003).
The effectiveness of interactive relevance feedback systems is discussed in
(Salton 1989, Harman 1992, Buckley et al. 1994b). Koenemann and Belkin
(1996) do user studies of the effectiveness of relevance feedback.
Traditionally Roget’s thesaurus has been the best known English language
thesaurus (Roget 1946). In recent computational work, people almost always
use WordNet (Fellbaum 1998), not only because it is free, but also because of
its rich link structure. It is available at: http://wordnet.princeton.edu.
Qiu and Frei (1993) and Schütze (1998) discuss automatic thesaurus generation.
Xu and Croft (1996) explore using both local and global query expan-
sion.