Experiments on incorporating syntactic processing of user queries into a document retrieval strategy

Traditional information has relied on the extensive use of statistical parameters in the implementation of retrieval strategies. This paper sets out to investigate whether linguistic processes can be used as part of a document retrieval strategy. This is done by predefining a level of syntactic analysis of user queries only, to be used as part of the retrieval process. A large series of experiments on an experimental test collection are reported which use a parser for noun phrases as part of the retrieval strategy. The results obtained from the experiments do yield improvements in the level of retrieval effectiveness and given the crude linguistic process used and the way it was used on queries and not on document texts, suggests that the approach of using linguistic processing in retrieval, is valid.

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