Abstract

In this paper, a new method for query expansion is proposed which expands the original query based on the contextual meaning of it. User provides the method with an original query and a set of relevant documents. The term space extracted from the relevant documents by the vector space model is transformed to a topic space by means of latent semantic analysis. The terms’ projections in the topic space are grouped to some clusters called topic clusters. Expansion terms are the terms which have the same topic as the query terms. The results are evaluated by users in Google search engines and evaluation results show that the proposed method improves significantly the user satisfaction.

Key words: Query expansion, term clustering, contextual topic, latent semantic analysis, cluster analysis.