Using Query Profiles for Clarification

The following paper proposes a new kind of relevance feedback. It shows how so-called query profiles can be employed for disambiguation and clarification. Query profiles provide useful summarized previews on the retrieved answers to a given query. They outline ambiguity in the query and when combined with appropriate means of interactivity allow the user to easily adapt the final ranking. Statistical analysis of the profiles even enables the retrieval system to automatically suggest search restrictions or preferences. The paper shows a preliminary experimental study of the proposed feedback methods within the setting of TREC’s interactive HARD track.