An associative model of word selection in the generation of search queries

Abstract

To generate a search query based on a end-user request, a database searcher has to select appropriate search terms. These terms can either be taken from the request, or they can be added by the searcher. This selection process is simulated by an associative lexical net; the nodes of the net are the terms used in 94 records of written requests to a psychological information agency and the respective on-line searches. The weights connecting the nodes are calculated from the co-occurrences of these terms in the abstracts of the database PsycLIT. To simulate the term selection process for a query, the nodes of all terms used in the written request are activated, and one or more spreading activation cycles are performed.The result of the simulation is a ranking of the terms according to the activities of their nodes. Simulations for all 94 records show a low mean activity rank for the terms selected from the request; the mean activity rank for new terms added by the searcher is lower than the mean activity rank for those terms of the request that were not used in the query. Associative ProcessesIn order to retrieve information from a data bank, a searcher has to translate a problem description given in natural language into an expression of the query language (see Example 1). The searcher of Example 1 started with the two complex terms PAARTHERAPIE and SELF CONCEPT. Because no document in the database contains both of these terms in the indicated field (CT), she tried out further terms. The final query:

A corpus-based approach to comparative evaluation of statistical term association measures

“…In information retrieval, statistical term association techniques based on term co-occurrences have been widely applied to automatic thesaurus construction (Chen & Lynch, 1992;Grefenstette, 1994;Park & Choi, 1995;Salton & Lesk, 1971) and query expansion (Ferber et al, 1995;Gauch & Wang, 1997;Kim & Choi, 1999;Kwon et al, 1994;Minker et al, 1972). As a somewhat different application, an association-based method was proposed for automatic indexing with a controlled vocabulary (Plaunt & Norgard, 1998).…”

Interactive query formulation

“…Kelly and Fu (2006) looked at use of words in queries that had appeared in the interface or come from suggestions formulated by human users; their results suggest that more terms came from the interface than from users. Ferber, Wettler, and Rapp (1995) used a lexical net to simulate the associative processes involved in word choice during QF. Smith and Wacholder (2010) have recently suggested that the very processing of the query may sometimes inhibit users from recognizing the potential usefulness of related words.…”

Developing a detailed view of query reformulation: One step in an incremental approach

“…To‐date, most research in information science has focused on sources of query terms external to the user; examples are the description of the information need, the list of search results, recently viewed web pages, query terms suggested by the search system, and search intermediaries (e.g., Kelly & Fu (2006), Vakkari (2002), Ferber et al (1995), and Spink (1994)). However, there is another source of query terms internal to the user – the individual's own lexical knowledge.…”