On the Usefulness of Extracting Syntactic Dependencies for Text Indexing

In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of interest in using Natural Language Processing in Information Retrieval research, with specific implementations varyingfrom the word-level morphological analysis to syntactic parsing to conceptual-level semantic analysis. In particular, different degrees of phrase-level syntactic information have been incorporated in information retrieval systems workingon English or Germanic languages such as Dutch. In this paper we study the impact of usingsuc h information, in the form of syntactic dependency pairs, in the performance of a text retrieval system for a Romance language, Spanish.