A few examples go a long way: Constructing query models from elaborate query formulations

We address a specific enterprise document search scenario, where the information need is expressed in an elaborate manner. In our scenario, information needs are expressed using a short query (of a few keywords) together with examples of key reference pages. Given this setup, we investigate how the examples can be utilized to improve the end-to-end performance on the document retrieval task. Our approach is based on a language modeling framework, where the query model is modified to resemble the example pages. We compare several methods for sampling expansion terms from the example pages to support query-dependent and query-independent query expansion; the latter is motivated by the wish to increase "aspect recall", and attempts to uncover aspects of the information need not captured by the query.
For evaluation purposes we use the CSIRO data set created for the TREC 2007 Enterprise track. The best performance is achieved by query models based on query-independent sampling of expansion terms from the example documents.