Handling document expressions for capturing conceptual query–document relations

If keywords or key phrases that characterize a query or a document are replaced and expressed by identifiers within a conceptual hierarchy such as a thesaurus, excellent searches can be expected by taking conceptual query-document relations of the identifiers into consideration. If, however, judgments to check for matches in the extracted documents take time, the efficiency of the entire system will decrease. In order to deal with this problem, a method is required to easily understand what type of relations exist between the queries and document as well as what the document is referring to. This paper will initially discuss how to handle document expressions that can clearly point out the manner in which the conceptual relations between the queries and documents generate while contributing to improvements in the retrieval efficiency. A method will then be shown that simplifies document expressions when there are many identifiers within a document expression. The effectiveness of this proposed method was ascertained through experiments using test collections for retrievals. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 38(9): 97–106, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (). DOI 10.1002sscj.10349