Content-based text querying with ontological descriptors

This paper describes a method and a system for content-based querying of texts based on the availability of an ontology for the concepts in the text domain. A key principle in the system is the extraction of conceptual content of noun phrases into descriptors forming an integral part of the ontology. The retrieval of text passages rests on matching descriptors from the text against descriptors from the noun phrases in the query. The match need not be exact but is mediated by the ontology, invoking in particular taxonomic reasoning with suband super concepts. The paper also reports on a prototype implementation of the system.