Automatic Detection of Thesaurus relations for Information Retrieval Applications

Is it possible to discover semantic term relations useful for thesauri without any semantic information? Yes, it is. A recent approach for automatic thesaurus construction is based on explicit linguistic knowledge, i.e. a domain independent parser without any semantic component, and implicit linguistic knowledge contained in large amounts of real world texts. Such texts include implicitly the linguistic, especially semantic, knowledge that the authors needed for formulating their texts. This article explains how implicit semantic knowledge can be transformed to an explicit one. Evaluations of quality and performance of the approach are very encouraging.