Successful information retrieval requires e�ective matching
between the user's search request and the contents of relevant
documents. Often the request entered by a user may
not use the same topic relevant terms as the authors' of the
documents. One potential approach to address problems
of query-document term mismatch is document expansion
to include additional topically relevant indexing terms in a
document which may encourage its retrieval when relevant
to queries which do not match its original contents well. We
propose and evaluate a new document expansion method
using external resources. While results of previous research
have been inconclusive in determining the impact of document
expansion on retrieval e�ectiveness, our method is
shown to work e�ectively for text-based image retrieval of
short image annotation documents. Our approach uses the
Okapi query expansion algorithm as a method for document
expansion. We further show improved performance can be
achieved by using a \document reduction" approach to include
only the signi�cant terms in a document in the expansion
process. Our experiments on the WikipediaMM task at
ImageCLEF 2008 show an increase of 16.5% in mean average
precision (MAP) compared to a variation of Okapi BM25 retrieval
model. To compare document expansion with query
expansion, we also test query expansion from an external resource
which leads an improvement by 9.84% in MAP over
our baseline. Our conclusion is that the document expansion
with document reduction and in combination with query expansion
produces the overall best retrieval results for shortlength
document retrieval. For this image retrieval task, we
also concluded that query expansion from external resource
does not outperform the document expansion method