Exploiting a large thesaurus for information retrieval

Abstract

Accuracy in information retrieval, that is, achieving both high recall and precision, is challenging because the relationship between natural language and semantic conceptual structure is not straightforward. However, effective retrieval requires that the semantic conceptual structure (or content) of both queries and documents be known. Natural language processing is one way to determine the content of a text. But, due to the complexity involved in natural language processing, various methods have been used which simulate (or approximate) representation of the content of both queries and documents.