Abstract

The rapid production of digital information makes the task of locating relevant information increasingly difficult. Keyword search alleviates this difficulty by retrieving documents containing keywords of interest. However, keyword search suffers from a number of issues such ambiguity, synonymy, and the inability to handle semantic constraints. Semantic search helps resolve these issues but is limited by the quality of annotations which are likely to be incomplete or imprecise. Hybrid search, a search technique that combines the merits of both keyword and semantic search, appears to be a promising solution. In this work we introduce HyKSS, a hybrid search system driven by extraction ontologies for both annotation creation and query interpretation. HyKSS is not limited to a single domain, but rather allows queries to cross ontological boundaries. We show that our hybrid search system, which uses a query driven dynamic ranking mechanism, outperforms keyword and semantic search in isolation, as well as a number of other non-HyKSS hybrid ranking approaches, over data sets of short topical documents. We also find that there is not a statistically significant difference between using multiple ontologies for query generation and simply selecting and using the best matching ontology.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

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