The Semantic Wildcard
Rada F. Mihalcea · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 2002
The IRSLO (Information Retrieval using Semantic and Lexical Operators) project aims at integrating semantic and lexical information into the retrieval process, in order to overcome some of the impediments currently encountered with today's information retrieval systems. This paper introduces the semantic wildcard, one of the most powerful operators implemented in IRSLO, which allows for searches along general-specific lines. The semantic wildcard, denoted with #, acts in a manner similar with the lexical wildcard, but at semantic levels, enabling the retrieval of subsumed concepts. For instance, a search for animal# will match any concept that is of type animal, including dog, goat and so forth, thereby going beyond the explicit knowledge stated in texts. This operator, together with a lexical locality operator that enables the retrieval of paragraphs rather than entire documents, have been both implemented in the IRSLO system and tested on requests of information run against an index of 130,000 documents. Significant improvement was observed over classic keyword-based retrieval systems in terms of precision, recall and success rate.