Using semantics for efficient information retrieval

Abstract

The paper presents a system for querying a base of HTML documents in natural language for a limited domain. Different small French corpora (heart surgery, newspaper articles, papers on natural language processing) are used for testing the prototype. The domain knowledge, represented in description logics (DL), is used for filtering the results of the search and is extended dynamically as result of DL inference mechanisms. The system uses shallow natural language parsing techniques and DL reasoning mechanisms are used to handle incomplete or incorrect user queries.