%A Ren Ke,Lu Wei,Ding Heng %T The Impacts of Query Specificity on Information Retrieval %0 Journal Article %D 2016 %J Data Analysis and Knowledge Discovery %R 10.11925/infotech.1003-3513.2016.11.05 %P 34-43 %V 32 %N 11 %U {https://manu44.magtech.com.cn/Jwk_infotech_wk3/CN/abstract/article_4290.shtml} %8 2016-11-25 %X

[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.