In usual Information Retrieval (IR) systems, the
user query is represented in the form of a keyword set.
Information resources are retrieved according to their
similarities to this query. Consequently if query is not
declared with appropriate terms, retrieved results would not
be satisfactory. Therefore query refinement procedures are
incorporated to improve the efficiency of the IR systems.
In this paper, an active learning approach has been
proposed for query expansion (QE) according to user
feedbacks. A novel document selection procedure is used to
acquire user feedbacks. In this procedure, firstly, the whole
set of documents are classified according to existing
feedbacks. Then a set of documents which are classified with
low certainty and do not produce redundant information are
selected as informative documents to get user feedbacks. In
this scenario, the number of feedbacks is equal to customary
relevance feedback methods but retrieval system would gain
more useful information.
Experimental results on Reuters-21578 full-text dataset
demonstrate considerable improvement in the performance
of retrieval system. It is shown experimentally that the
proposed method can effectively employ user’s feedback in
discovering the favorable hidden concepts too.