An analysis of ontology-based query expansion strategies

Sense based query expansion never proved its effectiveness except for the so-called " open domain question answering " task. The present work is still inconclusive at this regard, due to some experimental limitations, but we provide interesting evidence suggesting new guidelines for future research. Word sense disambiguation is in fact only one of the problems involved with sense based query expansion. The second is how to use sense information (and ontologies in general) to expand the query. We show that expanding with synonyms or hyperonyms has a limited effect on web information retrieval performance, while other types of semantic information derivable from an ontology are much more effective at improving search results.