Query Expansion on Compounds

Bolette Sandford Pedersen


Abstract
Compounds constitute a specific issue in search, in particular in languages where they are written in one word, as is the case for Danish and the other Scandinavian languages. For such languages, expansion of the query compound into separate lemmas is a way of finding the often frequent alternative synonymous phrases in which the content of a compound can also be expressed. However, it is crucial to note that the number of irrelevant hits is generally very high when using this expansion strategy. The aim of this paper is to examine how we can obtain better search results on split compounds, partly by looking at the internal structure of the original compound, partly by analyzing the context in which the split compound occurs. We perform an NP analysis and introduce a new, linguistically based threshold for retrieved hits. The results obtained by using this strategy demonstrate that compound splitting combined with a shallow linguistic analysis focusing on the recognition of NPs can improve search by bringing down the number of irrelevant hits.
Anthology ID:
L06-1350
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Aldo Gangemi, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/580_pdf.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bolette Sandford Pedersen. 2006. Query Expansion on Compounds. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Query Expansion on Compounds (Pedersen, LREC 2006)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/580_pdf.pdf