The Impacts of Query Specificity on Information Retrieval
Ren Ke1,Lu Wei1,2(),Ding Heng1
1School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China 2Center for the Study of Information Resources, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
[Objective] This paper analyzes the impacts of query specificity on the effectiveness of information retrieval systems, aiming to improve the performance of search engine and user experience. [Methods] First, we manually constructed a labeling set for queries from the TREC Web Track. Second, we adopted the Dirichlet language model, linear interpolation language model and BM25 model to examine each query’s performance. Finally, we used the average information retrieval evaluation index as the benchmark to explore the impacts of query specificity. [Results] For the highest-ranked results, the queries with narrower specificity had better retrieval performance than their boarder counterparts. [Limitations] The proposed method was only examined with data provided by TREC. More studies were needed to evaluate its performance with other data sets. [Conclusions] Search engines should focus on the precision of the highest ranked results, and then modify their retrieval model accordingly.
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