A Fuzzy-Related Thesaurus for Query Refinement

Query refinement is essential for information retrieval. In this study, a fuzzy-related thesaurus based query refinement mechanism is proposed. This thesaurus can be dynamically generated during the retrieval process for a document collection that is classified by an unsupervised neural network, the self-organising map. In contrast with general relational thesaurus, the fuzzy-related thesaurus is more effective and efficient. The relationships between the terms are based on the classification of a document collection, and thus, the generated thesaurus naturally has more power to enhance retrieval quality. The recognition of the relationships can be done automatically without human involvement, which significantly reduces the cost associated with the construction of the thesaurus. An evaluation on the query refinement mechanism based on the fuzzy-related thesaurus has conducted and the preliminary result is promising. A significant improvement on retrieval performance was observed when a fuzzy-related thesaurus was used for query refinement for a software document collection.