Lexical ambiguity and Information Retrieval revisited
Julio A. Gonzalo, Anselmo Peñas, Felisa Verdejo · 1999
A number of previous experiments on the role of lexical ambiguity in Information Retrieval are reproduced on the IR-Semcor test collection (derived from Semcor), where both queries and documents are hand-tagged with phrases, Part-Of-Speech and WordNet 1.5 senses. Our results indicate that a) Word Sense Disambiguation can be more beneficial to Information Retrieval than the experiments of Sanderson (1994) with artificially ambiguous pseudo-words suggested. b) PartOf -Speech tagging does not seem to help improving retrieval, even if it is manually annotated. c) Using phrases as indexing terms is not a good strategy if no partial credit is given to the phrase components. 1 Introduction A major difficulty to experiment with lexical ambiguity issues in Information Retrieval is always to differentiate the effects of the indexing and retrieval strategy being tested from the effects of tagging errors. Some examples are: 1. In (Richardson and Smeaton, 1995), a sophisticated retrieval system...