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<Paper uid="W98-0705">
  <Title>I I I I I I I I I I I I Indexing with WordNet synsets can improve text retrieval</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="42" end_page="43" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have experimented with a retrieval approach based on indexing in terms of WordNet synsets instead of word forms, trying to address two questions: 1) what potential does WordNet offer for text retrieval, abstracting from the problem of sense disambiguation, and 2) what is the sensitivity of retrieval performance to disambiguation errors. The answer to the first question is that indexing by synsets can be very helpful for text retrieval, our experiments give up to a 29% improvement over a standard SMART run indexing with words. We believe that these results have to be further contrasted, but they strongly suggest that WordNet can be more useful to Text Retrieval than it was previously thought.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The second question needs further, more finegrained, experiences to be clearly answered. However, for our test collection, we find that error rates below 30% still produce better results than standard word indexing, and that from 30% to 60% error rates, it does not behave worse than the standard SMART run. We also find that the queries have to be disambiguated to take advantage of the approach; otherwise, the best possible results with synset indexing does not improve the performance of standard word indexing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Our first goal now is to improve our retrieval system in many ways, studying how to enrich the query with semantically related synsets, how to corn- null pare documents and queries using semantic information beyond the cosine measure, and how to obtain weights for synsets according to their position in the WordNet hierarchy, among other issues.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> A second goal is to apply synset indexing in a Cross-Language environment, using the Euro Word-Net multilingual database (Gonzalo et al., In press). Indexing by synsets offers a neat way of performing language-independent retrieval, by mapping synsets into the EuroWordNet InterLingual Index that finks monolingual wordnets for all the languages covered by EuroWordNet.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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