Expanding Queries Through Word Sense Disambiguation

The use of semantic information in the right way can lead to improved precision and recall figures in Information Retrieval (IR) systems. This assumption is the start point for the work carried out by the MIRACLE research team at ImageCLEF 2006. For this purpose, an implementation of the specification marks Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) method [4] has been developed. This method is based on WordNet [2] and tries to select the right sense of each word appearing in the query. This allows the inclusion of only the correct synonyms when a semantic expansion is done. This selective expansion method has been combined with a deeper linguistic analysis to interpret negations and filter out common phrases and expressions used in query captions. Results of the application of these techniques to the image retrieval task in CLEF 2006 are also included.