Ontology-based Query Expansion for Arabic Text Retrieval

The semantic resources are important parts in the Information Retrieval (IR) such as search engines, Question Answering (QA), etc., these resources should be available, readable and understandable. In semantic web, the ontology plays a central role for the information retrieval, which use to retrieves more relevant information from unstructured information. This paper presents a semantic-based retrieval system for the Arabic text, which expands the input query semantically using Arabic domain ontology. In the proposed approach, the search engine index is represented using Vector Space Model (VSM), and the Arabic’s place nouns domain ontology has been used which constructed and implemented using Web Ontology Language (OWL) from Arabic corpus. The proposed approach has been experimented on the Arabic Quran corpus, and the experiments show that the approach outperforms in terms of both precision and recall the traditional keywordbased methods. Keywords—Information Retrieval; Arabic Ontology; Semantic Search; Arabic Quran Corpus