Concept Search: Semantics Enabled Information Retrieval

In this paper we present a novel approach, called Concept Search, which extends syntactic search, i.e., search based on the computation of string similarity between words, with semantic search, i.e., search based on the computation of semantic relations between concepts. The key idea of Concept Search is to operate on complex concepts and to maximally exploit the semantic information available, reducing to syntactic search only when necessary, i.e., when no semantic information is available. The experimental results show that Concept Search performs at least as well as syntactic search, improving the quality of results as a function of the amount of available semantics.