A quantum query expansion approach for session search

Recently, Quantum Theory (QT) has been employed to advance the theory of Information Retrieval (IR). Various analogies between QT and IR have been established. Among them, a typical one is applying the idea of photon polarization in IR tasks, e.g., for document ranking and query expansion. In this paper, we aim to further extend this work by constructing a new superposed state of each document in the information need space, based on which we can incorporate the quantum interference idea in query expansion. We then apply the new quantum query expansion model to session search, which is a typical Web search task. Empirical evaluation on the large-scale Clueweb12 dataset has shown that the proposed model is effective in the session search tasks, demonstrating the potential of developing novel and effective IR models based on intuitions and formalisms of QT.