Semantic-Based Hybrid Query Reformulation for Biomedical Information Retrieval

Abstract

Abstract Query reformulation is a well-known technique intended to improve the performance of Information Retrieval Systems. Among the several available techniques, Query Expansion (QE) reformulates the initial query by adding similar terms, drawn from several sources (corpus, knowledge resources), to the query terms in order to retrieve more relevant documents. Most QE methods are based on the relationships between the original query term and candidate terms (new terms) in order to select the most similar expansion terms. In this paper, we suggested a new hybrid query reformulation through QE and term re-weighting techniques. The suggested approach aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of QE with a semantic selection of candidate terms according to the specificity of original query terms in the improvement of retrieval performance. To this end, we exploited both relationships defined by knowledge resources and the distributed semantics, recently revealed by neural network analysis. For term re-weighting, we proposed a new semantic method based on semantic similarity measure that assigns a weight to each term of the expanded query. The conducted experiments on OHSUMED and TREC 2014 CDS test collections, including long and short queries, yielded significant results that outperformed the baseline and state-of-the-art approaches.