Interactive Thesaurus Navigation: Intelligence Rules OK?

We discuss whether it is feasible to build intelligent ruleor weight-based algorithms into general-purpose software for interactive thesaurus navigation. We survey some approaches to the problem reported in the literature, particularly those involving the assignment of “link weights” in a thesaurus network, and point out some problems of both principle and practice. We then describe investigations which entailed logging the behavior of thesaurus users and testing the effect of thesaurus-based query enhancement in an IR system using term weighting, in an attempt to identify successful strategies to incorporate into automatic procedures. The results cause us to question many of the assumptions made by previous researchers in this area.