Alternative Phrases And Natural Language Information Retrieval

This paper presents a formal analysis for a large class of words called alternative markers, which includes other(than), such(as), and besides. These words appear frequently enough in dialog to warrant serious attention, yet present natural language search engines perform poorly on queries containing them. I show that the performance of a search engine can be improved dramatically by incorporating an approximation of the formal analysis that is compatible with the search engine’s operational semantics. The value of this approach is that as the operational semantics of natural language applications improve, even larger improvements are possible.