Although most of the queries submitted to search engines are composed of a few keywords and have a length that ranges from three to six words, more than 15% of the total volume of the queries are verbose, introduce ambiguity and cause topic drifts. We consider verbosity a different property of queries from length since a verbose query is not necessarily long, it might be succinct and a short query might be verbose. This paper proposes a methodology to automatically detect verbose queries and conditionally modify queries. The methodology proposed in this paper exploits state-of-the-art classification algorithms, combines concepts from a large linguistic database and uses a topic gisting algorithm we designed for verbose query modification purposes. Our experimental results have been obtained using the TREC Robust track collection, thirty topics classified by difficulty degree, four queries per topic classified by verbosity and length, and human assessment of query verbosity. Our results suggest that the methodology for query modification conditioned to query verbosity detection and topic gisting is significantly effective and that query modification should be refined when topic difficulty and query verbosity are considered since these two properties interact and query verbosity is not straightforwardly related to query length. 
Detecting verbose queries and improving information retrieval