Experiments in term expansion using thesauri in Spanish

Abstract

This paper presents some experiments carried out this year in the Spanish monolingual task at CLEF2002. The objective is to continue our research on term expansion. Last year we presented results regarding stemming. Now, our effort is centred on term expansion using thesauri. Many words that derive from the same stem have a close semantic content. However other words with very different stems also have semantically close senses. In this case, the analysis of the relationships between words in a document collection can be used to construct a thesaurus of related terms. The thesaurus can then be used to expand a term with the best related terms. This paper describes some experiments carried out to study term expansion using association and similarity thesauri.