Automatische Thesauruserstellung und Query Expansion in einer E-Commerce-Anwendung

This work describes a method for the automatic construction of a thesaurus based on existing categories of documents. A clustering algorithm, “the layer seeds method”, is introduced, which facilitates the automatic generation of a thesaurus reflecting the specific vocabulary occurring in a given collection of documents. We assume that the collection is partitioned into document categories. The clustering works on terms extracted from the documents in a certain category and organizes them in a tree-like hierarchical structure. In an interactive retrieval system based on an intelligent agent, we used an automatically generated thesaurus to expand the user’s queries, in order to obtain better search results. A pilot application of the method was integrated into an e-commerce website. Dieses Dokument wird unter folgender creative commons Lizenz veröffentlicht: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/de/ 181 Libo Chen, Ulrich Thiel, Marcello L’Abbate