An association thesaurus for information retrieval
Yufeng Jing, W. Bruce Croft · 1994
Although commonly used in both commercial and experimental information retrieval systems, thesauri have not demonstrated consistent benefits for retrieval performance, and it is difficult to construct a thesaurus automatically for large text databases. In this paper, an approach, called PhraseFinder, is proposed to construct collection-dependent association thesauri automatically using large full-text document collections. The association thesaurus can be accessed through natural language queries in INQUERY, an information retrieval system based on the probabilistic inference network. Experiments are conducted in INQUERY to evaluate different types of association thesauri, and thesauri constructed for a variety of collections. 1 Introduction A thesaurus is a set of items ( phrases or words ) plus a set of relations between these items. Although thesauri are commonly used in both commercial and experimental IR systems, experiments have shown inconsistent effects on retrieval effectiven...