The contribution of morphological knowledge to French MeSH mapping for information retrieval

MeSH-indexed Internet health directories must provide a mapping from natural language queries to MeSH terms so that both health professionals and the general public can query their contents. We describe here the design of lexical knowledge bases for mapping French expressions to MeSH terms, and the initial evaluation of their contribution to Doc'CISMeF, the search tool of a MeSH-indexed directory of French-language medical Internet resources. The observed trend is in favor of the use of morphological knowledge as a moderate (approximately 5%) but effective factor for improving query to term mapping capabilities.