WordNet ontology based model for web retrieval

It is well known that ontologies will become a key piece, as they allow making the semantics of Semantic Web content explicit. In spite of the big advantages that the Semantic Web promises, there are still several problems to solve. Those concerning ontologies include their availability, development, and evolution. In the area of information retrieval, the dimension of document vectors plays an important role. Firstly, with higher index dimensions the indexing structures suffer from the "curse of dimensionality " and their efficiency rapidly decreases. Secondly, we may not use exact words when looking for a document, thus we miss some relevant documents. LSI is a numerical method, which discovers latent semantics in documents by creating concepts from existing terms. In this paper we present a basic method of mapping LSI concepts on given ontology (Word-Net), used both for retrieval recall improvement and dimension reduction. We offer experimental results for this method on a subset of TREC collection, consisting of Los Angeles Times articles.