nucleation

LIT-1079: Improving automatic query expansion

1 min read

Properties4
StatusActive — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1460) in full, from the ACM proceedings text re-hosted by SciSpace (https://typeset.io/pdf/improving-automatic-query-expansion-cmfn0svc0j.pdf), a copy the owner ruled lawful on 2026-10-30; worth reading as the source of the term query drift, "the alteration of the focus of a search topic caused by improper expansion", with its cause (off-topic documents at the top of a blind-feedback set) and a measure of how often expansion hurts. Read it knowing that its remedy is to rerank the feedback documents, that it is tested only on TREC 3–6 with SMART, and that it reports no significance tests.
Version3
Tagsinformation-retrieval
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1460 — Mitra, Singhal & Buckley — Improving automatic query expansion

Graph View

Mitra, M., Singhal, A. and Buckley, C. (1998). Improving automatic query expansion. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 206–214. DOI 10.1145/290941.290995

Read in full on 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1460), from the ACM proceedings text re-hosted by SciSpace.

Why this is here

The owner suspected at U21 that agent harnesses rediscover older information retrieval. A21 cited relevance feedback and the query-drift problem. This is a standard source for query drift, which TERM-056 distinguishes from question drift and CLAIM-301 builds on. Rocchio’s relevance feedback (1971) is the older source and is not registered, having no DOI. The reading confirms that query drift, in this paper, is the query moving off a topic that stays fixed (NOTE-1460).

Backlinks