Concept Based Query Expansion Using WordNet

Abstract

Query expansion is a widely studied technique for improving information retrieval effectiveness. In this paper we proposed a new query expansion technique using the comprehensive thesaurus WordNet and its semantic relatedness measure modules. Word sense disambiguation are performed on original query sentence, yielding the concept of each term in the query. Based on those recovered concepts, expanded query terms are generated from WordNet lexical database. The proposed method has been evaluated in document retrieval on the Web using query sentence. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate a 7% precision improvement over retrieval methods not employing query expansion techniques.