Knowledge Extraction for Information Retrieval

Document retrieval is the task of returning relevant textual resources for a given user query. In this paper, we investigate whether the semantic analysis of the query and the documents, obtained exploiting state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing techniques (e.g., Entity Linking, Frame Detection) and Semantic Web resources (e.g., YAGO, DBpedia), can improve the performances of the traditional term-based similarity approach. Our experiments, conducted on a recently released document collection, show that Mean Average Precision (MAP) increases of 3.5 percentage points when combining textual and semantic analysis, thus suggesting that semantic content can effectively improve the performances of Information Retrieval systems.