Improved Web Precision: An Interplay of Proximity Heuristics and Semantic Association of Query-Terms

This paper expounds a method to improve the precision of Web retrieval based on proximity and semantic association of terms for a multi-term query. We implement the three proximity measures: first appearance term distance (FTD), minimum term distance (MTD), and local occurrence density (LOD); and study the effectiveness of these measures from the perspective of semantic association of query terms. The experimental evaluation show that for the topic modifying type query terms, the MTD method has a remarkable effect on improving Web retrieval precision and for the topic collocating type query terms the LOD method has a remarkable effect on improving Web retrieval precision.