Simple Questions for Interactive Information Retrieval

We explore simple questions that can be used for interactive information retrieval. We develop four techniques that have the potential to be used in an interactive setting. The tech-niques are designed to be easy to use and understand, and provide good improvements in performance with minimal eort from the user. We test the automatic versions of the techniques in two environments known to be dicult, and report signicant improvements in performance as measured by MAP and GMAP over pseudo-relevance feedback. Our successful testing of one of the techniques in an interactive setting encourages the pursuit of more similar techniques to improve information retrieval with a new approach