Using WordNet in a Knowledge-Based Approach to Information Retrieval
CA-0196. School of Computer Applications Dublin City University, Ireland, (1995)Abstract
: The application of natural language processing tools and techniques to information retrieval tasks has long since been identified as potentially useful for the quality of information retrieval. Traditionally, IR has been based on matching words or terms in a query with words or terms in a document. In this paper we introduce an approach to IR based on computing a semantic distance measurement between concepts or words and using this word distance to compute a similarity between a query and a document. Two such semantic distance measures are presented in this paper and both are benchmarked on queries and documents from the TREC collection. Although our results in terms of precision and recall are disappointing, we rationalise this in terms of our experimental setup and our results show promise for future work in this area. 1 Introduction Many of the problems in information retrieval stem from the richness in terms of expressive power, yet the ambiguity inherent in natural language. N...