Sensitivity analysis of decision tree's learning effectiveness in Boolean query reformulation

One of the difficulties in using the current Boolean-based information retrieval systems is that it is hard for a user, especially a novice, to formulate an effective Boolean query. One solution to this problem is to let the system formulate a query for a user from his relevance feedback documents. In this research, an intelligent query reformulation mechanism based on ID3 is proposed and the sensitivity of its retrieval effectiveness, i.e., recall, precision, and E-measure, to various input settings is analyzed. The parameters in the input settings is the number of relevant documents. Experiments conducted on the test set of Medlars revealed that the effectiveness of the proposed system is in fact sensitive to the number of the initial relevant documents. The case with two or more initial relevant documents outperformed the case with one initial relevant document with statistical significances. It is our conclusion that formulation of an effective query in the proposed system requires at least two relevant documents in its initial input set.