WikiQuery -- An Interactive Collaboration Interface for Creating, Storing and Sharing Effective CNF Queries

Boolean Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) expansion can effectively address the vocabulary mismatch problem, a problem that current retrieval techniques have very limited ability to solve. Meanwhile, expert searchers are found to spend large amounts of time carefully creating manual CNF queries. These CNF queries are highly effective, and can outperform bag of word queries by a large margin. However, not many effective tools exist that can facilitate the efficient manual creation of effective CNF queries.

We describe such a publicly available search tool, WikiQuery, which can efficiently assist the users to create CNF queries through easy query editing and immediate access to search results. Experiments show that ordinary search users, with limited prior knowledge of Boolean queries, can use this intuitive tool to create effective CNF queries. We argue that tools like WikiQuery can attract and retain certain users from the commercial Web search engines, and may be a good starting point to build a research Web search engine