The detection of allusive text reuse is particularly challenging due to the
sparse evidence on which allusive references rely---commonly based on none or
very few shared words. Arguably, lexical semantics can be resorted to since
uncovering semantic relations between words has the potential to increase the
support underlying the allusion and alleviate the lexical sparsity. A further
obstacle is the lack of evaluation benchmark corpora, largely due to the highly
interpretative character of the annotation process. In the present paper, we
aim to elucidate the feasibility of automated allusion detection. We approach
the matter from an Information Retrieval perspective in which referencing texts
act as queries and referenced texts as relevant documents to be retrieved, and
estimate the difficulty of benchmark corpus compilation by a novel
inter-annotator agreement study on query segmentation. Furthermore, we
investigate to what extent the integration of lexical semantic information
derived from distributional models and ontologies can aid retrieving cases of
allusive reuse. The results show that (i) despite low agreement scores, using
manual queries considerably improves retrieval performance with respect to a
windowing approach, and that (ii) retrieval performance can be moderately
boosted with distributional semantics