Improvement of Queries using a Rule Based Procedure for Inflection of Compounds and Phrases

the quality of results obtained by the query, can be substantially improved by using various lexical resources. Thus, for example, morphological dictionaries enable morphological expansion of queries, which is very important in highly inflective languages, such as Serbian. This paper discusses issues related to improvement of queries using a rule based procedure implemented in WS4LR, a workstation for manipulating heterogeneous lexical resources developed by the Human Language Technology Group at the University of Belgrade. The procedure is used for automatic production of lemmas for a morphological dictionary from a given list of compounds, and its evaluation on several different sets of data is given. Several examples illustrate how this procedure can be used for improvement of queries for web search engines. Results obtained for these examples show that the number of documents obtained through a query by using our approach can be remarkably increased.