What is Query Processing?

Query Processing is the process of query term weight calculation, query augmentation, query context defining, and more. Query understanding and Query clustering are related to Information Retrieval tasks for the search engines.

Components of Query Processing

• Query parsing 📝
• Query Rewriting/ Expansion 📝
• Query term weight calculation ⚖️
• Question generation ❓
• Changing the query word order 🔄
• Stemming and lemmatization of query words ✂️
• Clustering query words 🧩

The goal of query processing is to ensure relevance for both the main search intent 🌟 and the minor search intent 💡.

The Processed Query May Include

• Phrases from the specific domain 🗂️
• Names 🏷️
• Variations of specific domain name words 🔠

The success of an exact match domain 📛 can depend on the coverage or the mutual word occurrence between the processed query variations and the domain name words.

Query Processing Process

Let’s break down the query: “What is the best Italian restaurant in New York City?” 🍝🏙️

Steps in Query Processing

1. Query Parsing 📝
   The search engine breaks down your query into individual terms:
   • “best”
   • “Italian”
   • “restaurant”
   • “New York City”
2. Query Term Weight Calculation ⚖️
   It determines the importance of each term. For this query: “Italian”, “restaurant”, and “New York City” might carry more weight.
3. Question Generation ❓
   The search engine might create related questions to refine results, like:
   • “What are the ratings of Italian restaurants in New York City?”
4. Query Word Order Changing 🔄
   It may rearrange the words to match common phrasing in sources, such as:
   • “Italian restaurant in New York City best”
5. Query Word Stemming and Lemmatization ✂️
   Terms are simplified to their root form. For example:
   • “restaurant” → includes “restaurants”
6. Query Word Clustering 🧩
   The search engine groups related terms, like: “Italian” + “restaurant”, to understand you’re searching for a type of restaurant, not just anything Italian.