A query suggestion method combining TF-IDF and Jaccard Coefficient for interactive web search

Abstract

This paper proposes a query suggestion method combining two ranked retrieval methods: TF-IDF and Jaccard coefficient. Four performance criteria plus user evaluation have been adopted to evaluate this combined method in terms of ranking and relevance from different perspectives. Two experiments have been conducted using carefully designed eighty test queries which are related to eight topics. One experiment aims to evaluate the quality of the query suggestions generated by the proposed method, and the other aims to evaluate the improvement of the relevance of retuned documents in interactive web search by using thequery suggestions so as to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed method. The experimental results show that the method developed in this paper is the best method for query suggestion among the methods evaluated, significantly outperforming the most popularly used TF-IDF method. In addition, the query suggestions generated by the proposed method significantly improve the relevance of returned documents in interactive web search in terms of increasing the precision or the number of highly relevant documents.