Evaluation of semantic relations impact in query expansion-based retrieval systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different semantic relations like synonymy and antonymy affect query expansion in retrieval systems, using taxonomy-based resources to improve intent classification and query reformulation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to generate semantic resources from taxonomy labels and evaluates their impact on query reformulation and classification accuracy.

Findings

Semantic relations significantly influence query reformulation effectiveness.

Optimal combination of relations balances improvement and noise.

Taxonomy-based resources enhance pseudo-query estimation.

Abstract

With the increasing demand of intelligent systems capable of operating in different contexts (e.g. users on the move) the correct interpretation of the user-need by such systems has become crucial to give consistent answers to the user questions. The most effective applications addressing such task are in the fields of natural language processing and semantic expansion of terms. These techniques are aimed at estimating the goal of an input query reformulating it as an intent, commonly relying on textual resources built exploiting different semantic relations like \emph{synonymy}, \emph{antonymy} and many others. The aim of this paper is to generate such resources using the labels of a given taxonomy as source of information. The obtained resources are integrated into a plain classifier for reformulating a set of input queries as intents and tracking the effect of each relation, in order to quantify the impact of each semantic relation on the classification. As an extension to this, the best tradeoff between improvement and noise introduction when combining such relations is evaluated. The assessment is made generating the resources and their combinations and using them for tuning the classifier which is used to reformulate the user questions as labels. The evaluation employs a wide and varied taxonomy as a use-case, exploiting its labels as basis for the semantic expansion and producing several corpora with the purpose of enhancing the pseudo-queries estimation.