Evaluation of Manual Query Expansion Rules on a Domain Specific FAQ Collection

摘要

Frequently asked question (FAQ) knowledge bases are a convenient way to organize domain specific information. However, FAQ retrieval is challenging because the documents are short and the vocabulary is domain specific, giving rise to the lexical gap problem. To address this problem, in this paper we consider rule-based query expansion (QE) for domain specific FAQ retrieval. We build a small test collection and evaluate the potential of QE rules. While we observe some improvement for difficult queries, our results suggest that the potential of manual rule compilation is limited.