A domain based approach to information retrieval in digital libraries

Abstract

The current abundance of electronic documents requires automatic techniques that support the users in understanding their content and extracting useful information. To this aim, improving the retrieval performance must necessarily go beyond simple lexical interpretation of the user queries, and pass through an understanding of their semantic content and aims. It goes without saying that any digital library would take enormous advantage from the availability of effective Information Retrieval techniques to provide to their users. This paper proposes an approach to Information Retrieval based on a correspondence of the domain of discourse between the query and the documents in the repository. Such an association is based on standard general-purpose linguistic resources (WordNet and WordNet Domains) and on a novel similarity assessment technique. Although the work is at a preliminary stage, interesting initial results suggest to go on extending and improving the approach. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.