Edgar Meij's PhD Thesis: Combining Concepts and Language Models for Information Access
November 24, 2010 emeij
A significant component of the modern internet are search engines; everyone can use search engines to find what s/he is looking for. However, an important limitation of current search engines is that they cannot "understand" the queries issued by a user. Recent advances have enabled the principled incorporation of language associated with concepts within the retrieval algorithm. Developments in the semantic web community, such as the LOD cloud, enable the association of texts with such knowledge on a large scale. This thesis investigates how one can improve information access by employing the actual use of concepts as measured by the language that people use when they discuss them. It describes how a search engine can interpret queries and how to find relevant information based on this interpretation. The main contribution is the introduction, description, and evaluation of a set of models and methods that enable users to retrieve and access information in a semantic fashion.
A significant component of the modern internet are search engines; everyone can use search engines to find what s/he is looking for. However, an important limitation of curren...
