Improving Search on the Semantic Desktop using Associative Retrieval Techniques

While it is agreed that semantic enrichment of resources would lead to better search results, at present the low coverage of resources on the web with semantic information presents a major hurdle in realizing the vision of search on the Semantic Web. To address this problem we investigate how to improve retrieval performance in a setting where resources are sparsely annotated with semantic information. We suggest employing techniques from associative information retrieval to find relevant material, which was not originally annotated with the concepts used in a query. We present an associative retrieval system for the Semantic Desktop and show how the use of associative retrieval increased retrieval performance.