Interactive Retrieval Based on Wikipedia Concepts

This paper presents a new user feedback mechanism based on Wikipedia concepts for interactive retrieval. In this mechanism, the system presents to the user a group of Wikipedia concepts, and the user can choose those relevant to refine his/her query. To realize this mechanism, we propose methods to address two problems: 1) how to select a small number of possibly relevant Wikipedia concepts to show the user, and 2) how to re-rank retrieved documents given the user-identified Wikipedia concepts. Our methods are evaluated on three TREC data sets. The experiment results show that our methods can dramatically improve retrieval performances.