Linguistic Analysis of Users' Queries: Towards an Adaptive Information Retrieval System

Most of information retrieval systems transform natural language users' queries into bags of words that are matched to documents, also represented as bags of words. Through such process, the richness of the query is lost. In this paper we show that linguistic features of a query are good indicators to predict systems failure to answer it. The experiments described here are based on 42 systems or system variants and 50 TREC topics that consist of a descriptive part expressed in natural language.