Query Expansion for Improving Web Search

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to retrieve the most relevant expansion words for expanding the initial query of the user in order to enhance the outcomes of web search results. Query expansion plays a major role in reformulating a user’s initial query to a one more pertinent to the user’s intended meaning. The reformulated query is then used to obtain more appropriate outcomes from a large amount of information on the web. The proposed semantic query expansion technique uses Wikipedia and WordNet as data sources. Wikipedia is taken as a base for all query expansions because it is one of the most diversified and relevant databases available on the web. To further improve the proposed query expansion technique,WordNet—a lexical database—is used as the as another data source because the synonyms (synsets) of the query term provided by it can be quite useful for query expansion. The proposed expansion technique successfully combines the two data sources to retrieve the most relevant expansion terms from the data sources in response to the user’s original query. The proposed work has been divided into four phases: (1) extraction of relevant words from Wikipedia (2) extraction of relevant words from WordNet (3) merging of the expansion terms obtained from Wikipedia and WordNet, and (4) query formulation by combining the expansion terms using Boolean operators. This reformulated query is then fired on the web to find the desired result. The Experimental result shows a significant improvement in information retrieval using query expansion.