Query expansion using heterogeneous thesauri

This paper proposes a method to improve the performance of information retrieval systems by expanding queries using heterogeneous thesauri. The expansion terms are taken from a hand-crafted thesaurus, co-occurrence-based automatically constructed thesaurus, and predicate-argument-based automatically constructed thesaurus. To avoid the effects of wrong expansion terms, a weighting method is devised such that the weight of expansion terms depend not only on the weight of all terms in query, but also the weight of those terms in each thesaurus. Experiments show that using heterogeneous thesauri with an appropriate weighting method results in better retrieval performance than using only one type of thesaurus. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.