Query reformulation to improve search performance

Overview

Project status: In progress

The project aims to build an add-on for Firefox (Toolbar or GreaseMonkey).

Given a user query the purpose of the tool is to suggest query expansion – that is, suggest a modification to the original query so that it may produce a better search result. There are numerous approaches to this and we shall seek to implement many of the existing approaches and develop new ones. This varies from simple topical expansion using a dictionary or thesaurus, to using more advanced linguistic approaches, natural language processing, personalisation, and more. The project will also involve the systematic evaluation of the tool against queries with other users of the tool. We aim to release the tool as open source application.

Research leader
Organisational unit
Lead unit Science and Engineering Faculty
Start date
1st July 2012
End date
1st July 2014
Research area
Computer Science
Keywords
query expansion, query suggestions, Information Retrieval, Search Engine Techniques