Building a Lexicon from Machine-Readable Dictionaries for Improved Information Retrieval

Nutter, Jane Terry and Fox, Edward A. and Evens, Martha W. (1990) Building a Lexicon from Machine-Readable Dictionaries for Improved Information Retrieval. Technical Report TR-90-17, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Abstract

Information retrieval systems have a tremendous potential for contributing to research in virtually all areas. To date, this potential has not been fully realized, largely because of problems with controlling retrieval. One way to viewing these problems is that retrieval systems use keywords as indices to retrieve texts, as opposed to understanding the words in requests. We describe a project for creating a lexicon from machine-readable dictionaries, which information retrieval systems can use to go beyond present indexing methods, bringing the actual performance of such systems closer to their potential.