Query Reduction for an Effective Japanese Statute Law Retrieval

In this study we investigate whether reducing very long Japanese Statute Law queries can improve the retrieval effectiveness of the Japanese civil law articles. In particular, we deploy two different query reduction techniques. In the first approach, we generate query terms by extracting key concepts from the original query using TagCrowd to create tag clouds. In order to test the generality of our approach, we deploy the Simplified Clarity Score query performance predictor to select the top 20 terms that are predicted to perform better during the retrieval. The results of this study suggest that reducing the original query can help improve the retrieval effectiveness of the Japanese civil law articles. In addition, expanding these reduced queries with more informative terms from the Japanese civil law articles result in the query drift problem and it degrades the retrieval performance.