Reformulation of queries using similarity thesauri

Abstract

One of the major problems in information retrieval is the formulation of queries on thepart of the user. This entails specifying a set of words or terms that express their informationalneed. However, it is well-known that two people can assign different terms to refer tothe same concepts. The techniques that attempt to reduce this problem as much as possiblegenerally start from a first search, and then study how the initial query can be modified toobtain better results. In general, the construction of the new query involves expanding theterms of the initial query and recalculating the importance of each term in the expandedquery. Depending on the technique used to formulate the new query several strategies aredistinguished. These strategies are based on the idea that if two terms are similar (withrespect to any criterion), the documents in which both terms appear frequently will also berelated. The technique we used in this study is known as query expansion using similaritythesauri.