Discovering Latent Information By Spreading Activation Algorithm For Document Retrieval

Syntactic search relies on keywords contained in a query to find suitable documents. So, documents that do not contain the keywords but contain information related to the query are not retrieved. Spreading activation is an algorithm for finding latent information in a query by exploiting relations between nodes in an associative network or semantic network. However, the classical spreading activation algorithm uses all relations of a node in the network that will add unsuitable information into the query. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for semantic text search, called query-oriented-constrained spreading activation that only uses relations relating to the content of the query to find really related information. Experiments on a benchmark dataset show that, in terms of the MAP measure, our search engine is 18.9% and 43.8% respectively better than the syntactic search and the search using the classical constrained spreading activation. NTRODUCTION With rapid development of the Word Wide Web and e-societies, information retrieval (IR) has many challenges in exploiting those rich and huge information resources. Whereas, the keyword based IR has many limitations in finding suitable documents for user's queries. Semantic search improves search precision and recall by understanding user's intent and the contextual meaning of terms in documents and queries.