Information Retrieval by Means of Word Sense Disambiguation

The increasing problem of information overload can be reduced by the improvement of information access tasks like Information Retrieval. Relevance Feedback plays a key role in this task, and is typically based only on the information extracted from documents judged by the user for a given query. We propose to make use of a thesaurus to complement this information to improve RF. This must be done by means of a Word Sense Disambiguation process that correctly identifies the suitable information from the thesaurus WordNET. The results of our experiments show that the utilisation of a thesaurus requires Word Sense Disambiguation, and that with this process, Relevance Feedback is substantially improved.