Building A Lexical Domain Map From Text Corpora

SUMMARY In information retrieval the task is to extract from the database ~dl ,and only the documents which are relevant to a user query, even when the query and the documents use little common vocabul~u'y. In this paper we discuss the problem of automatic generation of lexical relations between words ,and phrltses from large text corpora :rod their application to automatic query expansion ill information retrieval. Reported here ,are some preliminary resuhs and observations from the experiments with a 85 million word Wall Street Journal dalabase and a 45 million word San Jose Mercury News database (piu'ts of 0.5 billion word TIPSTER/TRECdatabàse).