Design and implementation of ontology-based query expansion for information retrieval

Abstract

In Information Retrieval (IR), the user's input query conditions usually are not detailed enough, so the satisfactory query results can not be brought back. Query expansion of IR can help to solve this problem. However, the common query expansion in IR cannot get steady retrieval results. In this paper, we propose and implement query expansion method which combines domain ontology with the frequent of terms. Ontology is used to describe domain knowledge; logic reasoner and the frequency of terms are used to choose fitting expansion words. By this way, higher recall and precise can be gotten as user' query results. Experimental results show that compared with the results of common query expansion, the method described in this paper can get statistically significant improvement in recall and precise combination. © 2008 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.