Lexical Query Paraphrasing for Document Retrieval

We describe a mechanism for the generation of lexical paraphrases of queries posed to an Internet resource. These paraphrases are generated using WordNet and part-of-speech information to propose synonyms for the content words in the queries. Statistical information, obtained from a corpus, is then used to rank the paraphrases. We evaluated our mechanism using 404 queries whose answers reside in the LA Times subset of the TREC-9 corpus. There was a 14% improvement in performance when paraphrases were used for document retrieval.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Ingrid Zukerman, Bhavani Raskutti
• Keywords: COLING 2002, COLING 2008, Content Words, Lexical Paraphrases, Paraphrases