Query association for effective retrieval

We introduce a novel technique for document summarisation which we call query association. Query association is based on the notion that a query that is highly similar to a document is a good descriptor of that document. For example, the user query "richmond football club" is likely to be a good summary of the content of a document that is ranked highly in response to the query. We describe this process of defining, maintaining, and presenting the relationship between a user query and the documents that are retrieved in response to that query. We show that associated queries are an excellent technique for describing a document: for relevance judgement, associated queries are as effective as a simple online query-biased summarisation technique. As future work, we suggest additional uses for query association including relevance feedback and query expansion.