Exploring the Use of Ontological Relations in Information Retrieval

The paper tries to explore how ontologies can contribute to information retrieval (IR) systems. Concepts and hierarchical relations of ontologies have been frequently used to expand concepts in queries, while non-hierarchical relations are seldom used in IR systems. We propose frameworks of integrating ontological relations in two parts of an IR system, query expansion and retrieved document organization. The effect of relations within the two frameworks will be examined and the methods are discussed as well