Ontology refinement for improved information retrieval

Ontologies are frequently used in information retrieval being their main applications the expansion of queries, semantic indexing of documents and the organization of search results. Ontologies provide lexical items, allow conceptual normalization and provide different types of relations. However, the optimization of an ontology to perform information retrieval tasks is still unclear. In this paper, we use an ontology query model to analyze the usefulness of ontologies in effectively performing document searches. Moreover, we propose an algorithm to refine ontologies for information retrieval tasks with preliminary positive results.