Context-sensitive semantic query expansion

Abstract

Modern information retrieval systems match the terms included in a user's query with available documents, through the use of an index. A fuzzy thesaurus is used to enrich the query with associated terms. In this work, we use semantic entities, rather than terms; this allows us to use knowledge stored in a semantic encyclopedia, specifically the ordering relations, in order to perform a semantic expansion of the query. The process of query expansion takes into account the query context, which is defined as a fuzzy set of semantic entities. Furthermore, we integrate our approach with the user's profile.