Natural Language Technology in Precision Content Retrieval

This paper describes a new approach to information access that combines techniques from natural language processing and knowledge representation with a new technique for relevance estimation and passage retrieval. Unlike many attempts to combine natural language processing with information retrieval, these results show significant benefit from using linguistic knowledge. Subsumption technology is used to automatically integrate syntactic, semantic, and morphological relationships among concepts that occur in the material, and to organize them into a structured conceptual taxonomy that is efficiently usable by retrieval algorithms and also effective for browsing.