Using Nlp or Nlp Resources for Information Retrieval Tasks

1. Abstract The imact of NLP on information retrieval tasks has largely been one of promise rather than substance. While there are exceptions to this as some of the chapters in the present volume demonstrate, for the most part NLP and information retrieval have only recently started to dovetail together. In this chapter we will present a pr ecis of our experiments in information retrieval using NLP which have had mixed successover the last few years. We introduce the respective roles of NLP and IR and then we summarise our early experiments on using syntactic analysis to derive term dependencies and structured representations of term-term relationships. We then rethought the role that NLP could have for IR tasks and decided to concentrate our eeorts onto using NLP resources rather than NLP tools in information retrieval and our more recent experiments in this area in which we use WordNet are summarised. Finally we present our conclusions and the status of our work. 1 2. Introduction The development of tools and resources for automatic natural language processing (NLP) has been ongoing for many decades albeit with many ups and downs. The principal driving forces behind this have been applications such as machine translation (MT), information management and natural language interfaces.