A new conceptual graph formalism adapted for multilingual information retrieval purposes

Abstract

In this paper, a graph formalism is proposed to describe the semantics of document in a multilingual context. This formalism is an extension of the Sowa formalism of conceptual graphs [8] in which two new concepts are added: vocabulary and term. Based on recent works, we propose a new comparison operator between graphs taking the specific needs of information retrieval into account. This operator is the core of the comparison function used in our multilingual documentary system, called SyDoM. SyDoM manages XML documents for virtual libraries. An English collection of articles has been used to evaluate SyDoM. This first evaluation gives better results than traditional Boolean documentary system. © 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.