Automatic thesaurus construction

Sydney, NS

Theoretical foundations of thesaurus construction

The theoretical foundations of recent work on automatic and semiautomatic thesaurus construction are briefly but critically reviewed, and limitations of current methods of automatic construction of thesaurus are pointed out. Need for a deeper study of the theoretical foundations of thesaurus construction is emphasized and a line of approach to it is suggested

Semi-automatic construction of Thesaurus

Describes computer program for generating a thesaurus from Feature Heading of a Bibliographical Record. Also gives a description of computer program for constructing synonym subject string. Programs are written in COBOL. Gives flow charts and a sample of thesaurus output

Technical aspects of Thesaurus Construction in TIPS

This paper describes the work done in the TIPS project about the construction of a thesaurus. This construction is a merge from a compilation of data from several web sources. These data comes from manual work, some data are real thesaurus, other are indexing recommendations. The merge is done with automatically extracted terms from large text corpora. The automatic extraction is based on both syntax and statistics. We present in this paper the way thesaurus are built and the results on Scientific corpus in the context of the TIPS project. This short paper emphasis on some technical aspects

Could we automatically reproduce semantic relations of an information retrieval thesaurus?

A well constructed thesaurus is recognized as a valuable source of semantic information for various applications, especially for Information Retrieval. The main hindrances to using thesaurus-oriented approaches are the high complexity and cost of manual thesauri creation. This paper addresses the problem of automatic thesaurus construction, namely we study the quality of automatically extracted semantic relations as compared with the semantic relations of a manually crafted thesaurus. The vector-space model based on syntactic contexts was used to reproduce relations between the terms of a manually constructed thesaurus. We propose a simple algorithm for representing both single word and multiword terms in the distributional space of syntactic contexts. Furthermore, we propose a method for evaluation quality of the extracted relations. Our experiments show significant difference between the automatically and manually constructed relations: while many of the automatically generated relations are relevant, just a small part of them could be found in the original thesaurus

Building Thesaurus from Manual Sources and Automatic Scanned Texts

International audienceThis paper describes the work done in the TIPS project about the construction of a thesaurus base. This construction is a merge from a thesaurus manually built and one automatically extracted from large text corpora. Several manually built thesaurus have been semi-formatted to be merged in a consistent common base. The automatic extraction is based on both syntax and statistics. We present in this paper the way thesaurus are built and the results on Scientific corpus in the context of the TIPS project

User - Thesaurus Interaction in a Web-Based Database: An Evaluation of Users' Term Selection Behaviour

A major challenge faced by users during the information search and retrieval process is the selection of search terms for query formulation and expansion. Thesauri are recognised as one source of search terms which can assist users in query construction and expansion. As the number of electronic thesauri attached to information retrieval systems has grown, a range of interface facilities and features have been developed to aid users in formulating their queries. The pilot study reported here aimed to explore and evaluate how a thesaurus-enhanced search interface assisted end-users in selecting search terms. Specifically, it focused on the evaluation of users' attitudes toward both the thesaurus and its interface as tools for facilitating search term selection for query expansion. Thesaurusbased searching and browsing behaviours adopted by users while interacting with a thesaurus-enhanced search interface were also examined

Thesaurus-assisted search term selection and query expansion: a review of user-centred studies

This paper provides a review of the literature related to the application of domain-specific thesauri in the search and retrieval process. Focusing on studies which adopt a user-centred approach, the review presents a survey of the methodologies and results from empirical studies undertaken on the use of thesauri as sources of term selection for query formulation and expansion during the search process. It summaries the ways in which domain-specific thesauri from different disciplines have been used by various types of users and how these tools aid users in the selection of search terms. The review consists of two main sections covering, firstly studies on thesaurus-aided search term selection and secondly those dealing with query expansion using thesauri. Both sections are illustrated with case studies that have adopted a user-centred approach