Searching the Web in Context: Genetic Algorithms for Exploring Query Space

CECCHINI ROCIO LUJÁN; LORENZETTI CARLOS MARTÍN; MAGUITMAN ANA GABRIELA; BRIGNOLE NÉLIDA BEATRIZ

Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires

Congreso; Jornadas Argentinas de Informatica e Investigacion Operativa; 2007

Sociedad Argentina de Informática

How to enable effective use of on-line information is an increasing problem, as technology enhances the ability to publish information rapidly and large quantities of information are instantly available for retrieval. In text-based web search, users’ information needs and candidate text resources are typically characterized by terms. Therefore, the quality of web retrieval is highly dependant on the vocabulary used to generate the search queries. Selecting good query terms is extremely difficult and presents many interesting research challenges. This paper applies Genetic Algorithms to develop a framework for the dynamic identification of “good query terms” to aid web search in the context of a theme. Starting with a population of terms from a thematic context, the techniques presented in this paper incrementally identify good candidate search queries. After a few generations, the population of queries evolves towards a set of queries that allows to retrieve material relevant to the given context. The proposed techniques have the potential to identify good queries even if some of the terms in the queries do not occur in the original context