Wikipedia-based query performance prediction

The query-performance prediction task is to estimate retrieval effectiveness with no relevance judgments. Pre-retrieval prediction methods operate prior to retrieval time. Hence, these predictors are often based on analyzing the query and the corpus upon which retrieval is performed. We propose a corpus-independent approach to preretrieval prediction which relies on information extracted from Wikipedia. Specifically, we present Wikipedia-based features that can attest to the effectiveness of retrieval performed in response to a query regardless of the corpus upon which search is performed. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the merits of our approach. As a case in point, integrating the Wikipedia- based features with state-of-the-art pre-retrieval predictors that analyze the corpus yields prediction quality that is consistently better than that of using the latter alone.