Expanding queries through word sense disambiguation

The use of semantic information in the right way can lead to improved precision and recall in Information Retrieval (IR) systems. This assumption is the start point for the work carried out by the MIRACLE research team at ImageCLEF 2006. For this purpose, an implementation of the specification marks Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) method Error! Reference source not found. has been developed. This method is based on WordNet Error! Reference source not found. and tries to select the right sense of each word appearing in the query. This allows the inclusion of only the correct synonyms when a semantic expansion is done. This selective expansion method has been combined with a deeper linguistic analysis to interpret negations and filter out common phrases and expressions used in query captions. Obtained results are included in Section 3 and, unfortunately, show that this approach to deal with semantics in IR systems does not lead to better precision and recall.