Interactive Search Refinement Techniques for HARD Tasks

In our entry to the new HARD track, we have investigated two methods of interactively refining user search formulations. One method consists of asking the user to select a number of sentences that may represent relevant documents, and then using the documents, whose sentences were selected for query expansion. The second method is to show to the user a list of noun phrases, extracted from the initial document set, and then expanding the query with the terms from the phrases selected by the user. The results show that the second method is an effective means of interactive query expansion and yields significant performance improvements. 1