Querying the web

Abstract

The lack of explicit semantics in the current Web can lead to ambiguity problems: for example, current search engines return unwanted information since they do not take into account the exact meaning given by user to the keywords used. Though disambiguation is a very well-known problem in Natural Language Processing and other domains, traditional methods are not flexible enough to work in a Web-based context.In this paper we have identified some desirable properties that a Web-oriented disambiguation method should fulfill, and make a proposal according to them. The proposed method processes a set of related keywords in order to discover and extract their implicit semantics, obtaining their most suitable senses according to their context. The possible senses are extracted from the knowledge represented by a pool of ontologies available in the Web. This method applies an iterative disambiguation algorithm that uses a semantic relatedness measure based on Google frequencies. Our proposal makes explicit the semantics of keywords by means of ontology terms; this information can be used for different purposes, such as improving the search and retrieval of underlying relevant information.