Query expansion is an effective technique to improve the performance of information re- trieval systems. Although hand-crafted lexi- cal resources, such as WordNet, could provide more reliable related terms, previous stud- ies showed that query expansion using only WordNet leads to very limited performance improvement. One of the main challenges is how to assign appropriate weights to expanded terms. In this paper, we re-examine this prob- lem using recently proposed axiomatic ap- proaches and find that, with appropriate term weighting strategy, we are able to exploit the information from lexical resources to sig- nificantly improve the retrieval performance. Our empirical results on six TREC collec- tions show that query expansion using only hand-crafted lexical resources leads to signif-...

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