FlexIR: a Domain-Specific Information Retrieval System

We present a precise search engine adapted to professional environments which are characterized by a domain (e.g. medicine, law, sport, and so on). In our approach, each domain has its own terminology (i.e. a set of terms that denote its concepts: team, player, etc.) and it is organized along dimensions, such as person, location, etc. The dimensions, as described below, are made of concepts and semantic relationships that represent a particular perspective or point of view on the domain. We mainly use the notion of domain dimension to: i) precisely index document content, and ii) develop an interactive interface which allows the user to precisely describe his or her information need and therefore precisely access the document collection.