Query Expansion Powered by Wikipedia Hyperlinks

This research introduces a new query expansion method that uses Wikipedia and its hyperlink structure to find related terms for reformulating a query. Queries are first understood better by splitting into query aspects. Further understanding is gained through measuring how well each aspect is represented in the original search results. Poorly represented aspects are found to be an excellent source of query improvement. Our main contribution is the way of using Wikipedia to identify aspects and underrepresented aspects, and to weight the expansion terms. Results have shown that our approach improves the original query and search results, and outperforms two existing query expansion methods.