Information Retrieval Based on Context Distance and Morphology

We present an approach to information retrieval based on context distance and morphology. Context distance is a measure we use to assess the closeness of word meanings. This context distance model measures semantic distances between words using the local contexts of words within a single document as well as the lexical co-occurrence information in the set of documents to be retrieved. We also propose to integrate the context distance model with morphological analysis in determining word similarity so that the two can enhance each other. Using the standard vector-space model, we evaluated the proposed method on a subset of TREC-4 corpus (AP88 and AP90 collection, 158,240 documents, 49 queries). Results show that this method improves the l l-point average precision by 8.6%.