The Exploration and Analysis of Using Multiple Thesaurus Types for Query Expansion in Information Retrieval

This paper proposes the use of multiple thesaurus types for query expansion in information retrieval. Hand-crafted thesaurus, corpus-based co-occurrence-based thesaurus and syntactic-relation-based thesaurus are combined and used as a tool for query expansion. A simple word sense disambiguation is performed to avoid misleading expansion terms. Experiments using TREC-7 collection proved that this method could improve the information retrieval performance significantly. Failure analysis was done on the cases in which the proposed method fail to improve the retrieval effectiveness. We found that queries containing negative statements and multiple aspects might cause problems in the proposed method.