Mining term association rules for automatic global query expansion: methodology and preliminary results

The authors are looking at the mining of association between terms for the automatic expansion of queries. The technique used for the discovery of the associations is association rule mining (R. Agrawal et al., 1996). The technique proposed is more flexible than previous techniques based on term co-occurrence since it takes into account not only the co-occurrence frequency but also the confidence and direction of the association rules. We have been able to consistently improve the effectiveness of the retrieval over the set of 48 test queries on the Associated Press 1990 news wires corpus of the TREC4 benchmark by query expansion using term association rules.