Computational Semantics and Information Retrieval
Christof Monz, J. Bos, M. Kohlhase · 2000
Introduction In this talk I want to review the area of Information Retrieval (IR) from a computational semanticist's point of view. There have been several attempts to integrate Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques into IR and I want to discuss some of those attempts and point out some opportunities and challenges for computational semantics. Research in IR is aimed at designing and evaluating systems that try to fulll a user's information need. Often, this is a user posing a query to a database. An IR system can react in a variety of ways. For instance, it can present a list of documents presumably containing the information the user is looking for (ad-hoc retrieval), or it can directly answer a user's question by generating natural language sentences or extracting sentences from the database (Question-Answering). The database itself is simply a collection of natural language documents. From an abstract point of view, a document d is relevant to a qu