Predicting the cumulative effect of multiple query formulations

Multiple query formulations (MQF) have been extensively explored and when used, provide considerable improvements in quality of information retrieval on the Web. However, the question of how to formulate a variety of distinctive queries and how many queries are needed in each unique case remains essentially unanswered. In this research we present a process for selecting search terms and formulating multiple short queries from the original long query. We introduce a scaled cumulative query weight (t) function which is based exclusively on the submitted long query. We demonstrate that this function can serve as a predictive variable for the effectiveness of various multiple query formulation methods and can be used algorithmically to determine the operational parameters for a multiple query formulation process.