Hybrid Query Expansion Model Based on Pseudo Relevance Feedback and Semantic Tree for Arabic IR

In this paper, the authors propose and readapt a new concept-based approach of query expansion in the context of Arabic information retrieval. The purpose is to represent the query by a set of weighted concepts in order to identify better the user's information need. Firstly, concepts are extracted from the initially retrieved documents by the Pseudo-Relevance Feedback method, and then they are integrated into a semantic weighted tree in order to detect more information contained in the related concepts connected by semantic relations to the primary concepts. The authors use the “Arabic WordNet” as a resource to extract, disambiguate concepts and build the semantic tree. Experimental results demonstrate that measure of MAP (Mean Average Precision) is about 10% of improvement using the open source Lucene as IR System on a collection formed from the Arabic BBC news.