Lexical Query Paraphrasing for Document Retrieval

We describe a mechanism for the generation of lexical paraphrases of queries posed to an Internet resource. These paraphrases are generated using WordNet and part-of-speech information to propose synonyms for the content words in the queries. Statistical information, obtained from a corpus, is then used to rank the paraphrases. We evaluated our mechanism using 404 queries whose answers reside in the LA Times subset of the TREC-9 corpus. There was a 14% improvement in performance when paraphrases were used for document retrieval.

• Publication year

  2002

• Venue

  International Conference on Computational Linguistics

• Publication date

  2002-08-24

• Fields of study

  Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3115/1072228.1072389
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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