Incremental blind feedback: An effective approach to automatic query expansion

Automatic query expansion (AQE) is a useful technique for enhancing the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. In this article, we propose a novel AQE algorithm which first adopts a systematic incremental approach to choose feedback documents from the top retrieved set and then selects the expansion terms aggregating the scores from each feedback set. We also devise a term selection measure and a number of weighting schemes based on easily computable features. A set of experiments with a large number of standard test collections reveals that the proposed incremental blind feedback algorithm outperforms a number of state-of-the-art query expansion methods with remarkable significance and consistency.