Query expansion with a little help from twitter

With the advent and rapid spread of microblogging services, web information management finds a new research topic. Although classical information retrieval methods and techniques help search engines and services to present an adequate precision in lower recall levels (top-k results), the constantly evolving information needs of microblogging users demand a different approach, which has to be adapted to the dynamic nature of On-line Social Networks (OSNs). In this work, we use Twitter as microblogging service, aiming to investigate the query expansion provision that can be extracted from large graphs, and compare it against classical query expansion methods that require mainly prior knowledge, such as browsing history records or access and management of search logs. We provide a direct comparison with mainstream media services, such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, NBC and Reuters, while we also evaluate our approach by subjective comparisons in respect to the Google Hot Searches service. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013