TheSys - A comprehensive thesaurus system for intelligent document analysis and text retrieval

Well designed thesauri can represent seman-tic/conceptual knowledge so as to reveal relationships among diierent elements in documents, thus serving as a critical tool in intelligent text retrieval systems and document analysis systems. In this paper, we present a thesaurus system, referred to as TheSys, which can be used as a tool for users to build thesauri according to their own requirements. It is our goal to design a comprehensive thesaurus building tool which can be used in any eld of specialty rather than targeting for a particular specialty eld. People can use our system to build an electronic thesaurus in any specialty eld required for a speciic application. We propose a thesaurus model, referred to as the thesaurus frame, which uses weighted links, to represent semantic relationships among concepts and terms. Our approach is to use a set of controlled terms, referred to as seman-temes, to build the thesaurus frame. This approach can eeectively reduce the size of the thesaurus yet the intelligence of the thesaurus is not compromised.