An Initial Investigation of Query Expansion Bias

Wilkie, C. and Azzopardi, L. (2017) An Initial Investigation of Query Expansion Bias. In: ICTIR 2017: The 3rd ACM International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1-4 Oct 2017, pp. 285-288. ISBN 9781450344906 (doi: 10.1145/3121050.3121097)

Abstract

In this work, the relationship between performance and retrievability bias is explored when various query expansion methods are employed to aide retrieval. Several parameters are altered, independently, to identify those that have an impact on bias. Parameters altered include; Rocchio's beta, length normalisation parameters, the number of terms added and the number of documents those terms are extracted from. A strong correlation between performance and retrievability bias is identified, suggesting that query expansion increases performance by making the system more biased.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Azzopardi, Dr Leif and Wilkie, Mr Colin
• Authors: Wilkie, C., and Azzopardi, L.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Publisher: ACM Press
• ISBN: 9781450344906
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2017 ACM
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval, pp. 285-288
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.