Reformulation of queries using similarity thesauri

• Published in: Information processing & management 2005-09, Vol.41 (5), p.1163-1173
• Main Authors: Zazo, Ángel F., Figuerola, Carlos G., Berrocal, José L. Alonso, Rodrı́guez, Emilio
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computerized information retrieval; Exact sciences and technology; Information and communication sciences; Information processing and retrieval; Information retrieval; Information retrieval. Man machine relationship; Information science. Documentation; Query expansion; Research process. Evaluation; Sciences and techniques of general use; Searching; Similarity measures; Similarity thesaurus; Term weighting; Terms; Thesauri; Weighting
• ISSN: 0306-4573; 1873-5371
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ipm.2004.05.006

One of the major problems in information retrieval is the formulation of queries on the part of the user. This entails specifying a set of words or terms that express their informational need. However, it is well-known that two people can assign different terms to refer to the same concepts. The techniques that attempt to reduce this problem as much as possible generally start from a first search, and then study how the initial query can be modified to obtain better results. In general, the construction of the new query involves expanding the terms of the initial query and recalculating the importance of each term in the expanded query. Depending on the technique used to formulate the new query several strategies are distinguished. These strategies are based on the idea that if two terms are similar (with respect to any criterion), the documents in which both terms appear frequently will also be related. The technique we used in this study is known as query expansion using similarity thesauri.