Navigating the User Query Space

Query performance prediction (QPP) aims to automatically estimate the performance of a query. Recently there have been many attempts to use these predictors to estimate whether a perturbed version of a query will outperform the original version. In essence, these approaches attempt to navigate the space of queries in a guided manner. In this paper, we perform an analysis of the query space over a substantial number of queries and show that (1) users tend to be able to extract queries that perform in the top 5% of all possible user queries for a specific topic, (2) that post-retrieval predictors outperform pre-retrieval predictors at the high end of the query space. And, finally (3), we show that some post retrieval predictors are better able to select high performing queries from a group of user queries for the same topic.