Vocabulary Problem in Internet Resource Discovery

When searching information in a retrieval system, people use a variety of terms to describe their information needs. When the terms used in a query are different from those indexed by the system, users fail to obtain the information they want. This is called the vocabulary problem. In the Internet, the thousands of autonomously managed information systems acutely suffer this problem. This paper proposes a solution that uses latent semantic indexing to ameliorate the vocabulary problem in Internet resource discovery. 1 Introduction A deficiency of traditional information retrieval systems is that the search terms are often different from those indexed by the systems. Thus, users may either retrieve wrong information or miss what they seek. This is called the vocabulary problem [9]. In general, there are two types of vocabulary problems. One is called the synonymy problem, the other the polysemy problem [6]. Both problems occur because people's backgrounds and problem contexts differ. S..