Query Expansion Based on Semantics and Statistics in Chinese Question Answering System

In Chinese question answering system, because there is more semantic relation in questions than that in query words, the precision can be improved by expanding query while using natural language questions to retrieve documents. This paper proposes a new approach to query expansion based on semantics and statistics.Firstly automatic relevance feedback method is used to generate a candidate expansion word set. Then the expanded query words are selected from the set based on the semantic similarity and seman-tic relevancy between the candidate words and the original words. Experiments show the new approach is effective for Web retrieval and out-performs the conventional expansion approaches.