An empirical study of query expansion and cluster-based retrieval in language modeling approach

The term mismatch problem in information retrieval is a critical problem, and several techniques have been developed, such as query expansion, cluster-based retrieval and dimensionality reduction to resolve this issue. Of these techniques, this paper performs an empirical study on query expansion and cluster-based retrieval. We examine the effect of using parsimony in query expansion and the effect of clustering algorithms in cluster-based retrieval. In addition, query expansion and cluster-based retrieval are compared, and their combinations are evaluated in terms of retrieval performance by performing experimentations on seven test collections of NTCIR and TREC.