Information retrieval by means of word sense disambiguation

Abstract

The increasing problem of information overload can be reduced by the improvement of information access tasks like Information Retrieval. Relevance Feedback plays a key role in this task, and is typically based only on the information extracted from documents judged by the user for a given query. We propose to make use of a thesaurus to complement this information to improve RF. This must be done by means of a Word Sense Disambiguation process that correctly identifies the suitable information from the thesaurus WordNet. The results of our experiments show that the utilisation of a thesaurus requires Word Sense Disambiguation, and that with this process, Relevance Feedback is substantially improved.