Semantics-based Expansion of Search Queries Enforcing Lateral Thinking

Web search engines are equipped with query expansion facilities to reformulate a seed query and improve retrieval performance. However, such techniques are usually used in accordance with traditional Information Retrieval approaches, which do not distinguish between creative and conventional uses of languages, or between literal and non-literal meanings. But to support a more creative search, with the ultimate objective of being surprised or inspired by the results, non-literal relationships between queries and the texts that they match should be facilitated. This paper presents a query expansion method with a lateral thinking approach, by suggesting, starting from a seed term given by the user, a set of lists of terms representing conceptual paths, each of which starts from the seed term. Each term in the path is reached by traversing pre-identified relationships in a given semantic network, while the selection of a specific term is driven by the assessment of a distance metrics between terms. The paper also presents a software implementation of the method, which can be accessed as a mobile web app.