Using Syntactic Dependency-Pairs Conflation to Improve Retrieval Performance in Spanish

This article presents two new approaches for term indexing which are particularly appropriate for languages with a rich lexis and morphology, such as Spanish, and need few resources to be applied. At word level, productive derivational morphology is used to conflate semantically related words. At sentence level, an approximate grammar is used to conflate syntactic and morphosyntactic variants of a given multi-word term into a common base form. Experimental results show remarkable improvements with regard to classical indexing methods.