A multilingual semantic search assistant to facilitate information retrieval.
Soonho Kim, Jeetendra Singh, Ze Li, Andrew D. Bagdanov, Ajay Krishnan, Margherita Sini, Johannes Keizer, T. V. Prabhakar, Zhong Wang, T. Nagatsuka, Satoki P. Ninomiya · 2008
This paper describes a multilingual semantic search assistant (MSSA) that could help users find proper keywords in FAO fulltext-based search engines. The MSSA implements four independent functions each associated with the AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus to assist users in choosing better keywords: a Venn diagram-based Boolean search interface, an animated AGROVOC concept browser, cross-language query expansion for five official FAO languages, and domain-specific synonym expansion. A usability study of cross-language support and domain-specific synonym expansion was performed through a comparative evaluation of precision and recall in the WAICENT Information Finder. The cross-language support functionality yielded a significant increase in recall without any decrease in precision when compared to a simple search in. Domain-specific synonym expansion, on the other hand, made no significant difference in precision and recall. We suggest some ways to improve the performance of MSSA. Keyword: AGROVOC, multilingual semantic search, search assistant, multilingual, semantic, information retrieval, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation, WAICENT Information Finder, Web Services, Boolean search, topic browser, cross-language query expansion, synonym expansion