An Architecture for Emergent Semantics

Emergent Semantics is a new paradigm for inferring semantic meaning from implicit feedback by a sufficiently large number of users of an object retrieval system. In this paper, we introduce a universal architecture for emergent semantics using a central repository within a multi-user environment, based on solid linguistic theories. Based on this architecture, we have implemented an information retrieval system supporting keyword queries on standard information retrieval corpora. Contrary to existing query refinement strategies, feedback on the retrieval results is incorporated directly into the actual document representations improving future retrievals. An evaluation yields higher precision values at the standard recall levels and thus demonstrates the effectiveness of the emergent semantics approach for typical information retrieval problems.