A new fuzzy logic-based query expansion model for efficient information retrieval using relevance feedback approach

Abstract Efficient query expansion (QE) terms selection methods are really very important for improving the accuracy and efficiency of the system by removing the irrelevant and redundant terms from the top-retrieved feedback documents corpus with respect to a user query. Each individual QE term selection method has its weaknesses and strengths. To overcome the weaknesses and to utilize the strengths of the individual method, we used multiple terms selection methods together. In this paper, we present a new method for QE based on fuzzy logic considering the top-retrieved document as relevance feedback documents for mining additional QE terms. Different QE terms selection methods calculate the degrees of importance of all unique terms of top-retrieved documents collection for mining additional expansion terms. These methods give different relevance scores for each term. The proposed method combines different weights of each term by using fuzzy rules to infer the weights of the additional query terms. Then, the weights of the additional query terms and the weights of the original query terms are used to form the new query vector, and we use this new query vector to retrieve documents. All the experiments are performed on TREC and FIRE benchmark datasets. The proposed QE method increases the precision rates and the recall rates of information retrieval systems for dealing with document retrieval. It gets a significant higher average recall rate, average precision rate and F measure on both datasets.