Natural language text can be seen as a symbolic representation of a cognitive state of the creator that comprises concepts and the relations among those concepts. Much work has been done in Information Science, especially within Information Retrieval (IR), concerning the handling of concepts, most notably in the form of keywords. Much less effort has been spent toward the understanding and handling of the semantic relations that contextually bind concepts together. While it has been shown (Wang, et al., 1985) that the use of these semantic relations for query enhancement can increase retrieval effectiveness, the proper handling of semantic relations has a much wider application than just query enhancement. Once relations inherent in text are identified and captured, they can be used to provide contextual information to the concepts in the representations of the text, which otherwise would be treated as if they were independent and separate
