A conceptual representation of documents and queries for information retrieval systems by using light ontologies

This article presents a vector space model approach to representing documents and queries, based on concepts instead of terms and using WordNet as a light ontology. Such representation reduces information overlap with respect to classic semantic expansion techniques. Experiments carried out on the MuchMore benchmark and on the TREC-7 and TREC-8 Ad-Hoc collections demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.