Abstract
Boolean retrieval is simple and elegant. However, since there is no provision for term weighting, no ranking of the answer set is generated. As a result, the size of the output might be too large or too small. Relevance feedback is the most popular query reformulation strategy. in a relevance feedback cycle, the user is presented with a list of the retrieved documents and, after examining them, marks those which are relevant. In practice, only the top 10(or 20) ranked documents need to be examined. The main idea consists of selecting important terms, or expressions, attached to the documents that have been identified as relevant by the user, and of enhancing the importance of these terms in a new query formulation. The expected effect is that the new query will be moved towards the relevant documents and away from the non-relevant ones. Local analysis techniques are interesting because they take advantage of the local context provided with the query. In this regard, they seem more appropriate than global analysis techniques. In a local strategy, the documents retrieved for a given query q are examined at query time to determine terms for query expansion. This is similar to a relevance feedback cycle but might be done without assistance from the user.
