A Comparative Analysis of Human and Automatic Query Variants

We present an in-depth comparative analysis of the effectiveness distributions of sets of human-created and automatically-created query variations used to represent the same information need. The automatic variations are generated using Bing's click graph. Experiments performed with TREC datasets show that using automatic variations for retrieval can result in similar effectiveness to that of using human variations, although the two types of variations can be appreciably different in several important respects --- e.g., their similarities and corresponding retrieved lists.