Flexible-Equality of Terms: Definition and Evaluation
Chantal Enguehard · Flexible Query Answering Systems · 2001
The recognition of index terms is a very frequent way of answering a query through the identification of documents which fit the query. However, these terms can vary in their form (singular or plural, verbal or nominal form, etc.) and become difficult to identify. We present the flexible-equality of terms which determines whether two terms can be considered as variations one from the other. This operator is based on the minimum editing distance between two strings and has been extended to complex terms (composed of several words). This operator does not require large amounts of linguistic resources other than a list of functional words. We evaluate the performances of the algorithm by comparison with the results of FASTR, a system dedicated to the recognition of complex terms, on an English corpus. This system is based on linguistic treatments and uses linguistic resources. We found a rate of recall of 76,6% and a rate of precision of 96,3% on complex terms.