Query expansion with thesaurus is one of the useful techniques in modern information retrieval (IR). In this paper, a method of query expansion for Chinese IR by using a decaying co-occurrence model is proposed and realized. The model is an extension of the traditional co-occurrence model by adding a decaying factor that decreases the mutual information when the distance between the terms increases. Experimental results on TREC-9 collections show this query expansion method results in significant improvements over the IR without query expansion.
