A New Approach for Automatic Thesaurus Construction and Query Expansion for Document Retrieval

In this paper, we present a new approach for automatic thesaurus construction and query expansion for document retrieval. We analyze the information between any two terms in each document cluster center of final document clusters or intermediate document clusters in the clustering process to automatically construct the thesaurus, where these information includes the co-occurrence frequency of any two terms in each document cluster center, the degree of effect of each term in each document cluster center and the inner noise of each document cluster, respectively. We also present a query expansion method to expand the user’s queries and present a new method to calculate the degree of similarity between the user’s query and documents. The proposed thesaurus construction method and the proposed query expansion method can improve the performance of information retrieval systems for dealing with document retrieval.