Semantic Query Expansion for Arabic Information Retrieval

Abstract

Traditional keyword based search is found to have some limitations. Such as word sense ambiguity, and the query intent ambiguity which can hurt the precision. Semantic search uses the contextual meaning of terms in addition to the semantic matching techniques in order to overcome these limitations. This paper introduces a query expansion approach using an ontology built from Wikipedia pages in addition to other thesaurus to improve search accuracy for Arabic language. Our approach outperformed the traditional keyword based approach in terms of both F-score and NDCG measures.