INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL BASED ON CONCEPTUAL DISTANCE IN IS-A HIERARCHIES

Abstract

There have been several document ranking methods to calculate the conceptual distance or closeness between a Boolean query and a document. Though they provide good retrieval effectiveness in many cases, they do not support effective weighting schemes for queries and documents and also have several problems resulting from inappropriate evaluation of Boolean operators. We propose a new method called Knowledge-Based Extended Boolean Model (KB-EBM) in which Saltons extended Boolean model is incorporated. KB-EBM evaluates weighted queries and documents effectively, and avoids the problems of the previous methods. KB-EBM provides high quality document rankings by using term dependence information from is-a hierarchies. The performance experiments show that the proposed method closely simulates human behaviour.