The role of manually-assigned keywords in query expansion

We report on two types of experiments with respect to manually-assigned keywords to documents in a collection. The first type of experiment examines the usefulness of manually-assigned keywords to automatic feedback. The second type of experiment considers the potential benefits of these keywords to the user as an interactive tool. Several experiments were run and compared. The results of these experiments indicate that there is no gain in average precision when manually-assigned keywords are used for query expansion. Further, manually-assigned keywords did not aid the user as an interactive tool for document understanding.

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