On the query refinement in the ontology-based searching for information

Abstract

One of the main problems in the (web) information retrieval is the ambiguity of the users' queries, since the users tend to post very short queries. This seems to be valid for the ontology-based information retrieval in which the domain ontology is used as the backbone of the searching process. In this paper we present a novel approach for determining the possible refinements of an ontology-based query. The approach is based on measuring the ambiguity of a query with respect to the original user information need. We defined several types of the ambiguities concerning the structure of the underlying ontology and the content of the information repository. For each of these ambiguities we defined the set of refinements/explanations, which help in more efficient searching for information in an ontology-based information repository. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.