Conceptual Query Expansion

Query expansion has been extensively studied as a technique for increasing information retrieval performance. However, due to the volume of documents available on the web, many of the techniques that have been successful in traditional information retrieval systems do not scale well to web information retrieval. We propose a new technique based on conceptual semantic theories, in contrast to the structuralist semantic theories upon which other techniques are based. The source of the query expansion information is the concept network knowledge base. Query terms are matched to those contained in the concept network, from which concepts are deduced and additional query terms are selected. In this paper, we describe the theoretical basis for this in-progress research, along with some preliminary results.