Enhancing semantic Arabic information retrieval via arabic wikipedia assisted search expansion layer

Abstract

Deducing user intent of query texts is one of the challenging areas in semantic search engines to improve generalization and relevancy of query results. Most of the existing works rely on semantic ontologies to provide such knowledge. Nevertheless, semantic ontologies are not complete in many languages such as Arabic. This research proposes Arabic Wikipedia Assisted Search Expansion Layer (AWASEL), a system that enhances semantic text retrieval relying on Arabic Wikipedia. AWASEL intend to improve search results by adding relevant cross concepts to the original user’s query. The system is evaluated against Arabic news titles and headlines. In most cases, AWASEL was able to extract distinct documents which cover related background information needed to understand the news topic. Experimental evaluation of AWASEL showed that in terms of relevancy, it achieves precision 83.5% and recall 85.3%, and in terms of generalization, retrieved results are higher than initial user’s query represent for extracted results.