Variations of Natural Language Questions and Impacts On Information Retrieval

This paper is an investigation of the impact that varieties of natural language questions have on information retrieval. Ten questions were chosen and ten paraphrases of each were input into Google and Bing. The results indicated that the templates do not have a significant impact on the performance of these search engines. Instead, the results showed that questions about culturally salient information is more likely to yield an effective query, regardless of how it is phrased. Queries about other kinds of information do not perform as well because the indexing of web pages does not appear to favor more obscure topics.Master of Science in Information Scienc