Concept-based information access

Concept-based access to information promises important benefits over keyword-based access. One of these benefits is the ability to take advantage of semantic relationships among concepts in finding relevant documents. Another benefit is the elimination of irrelevant documents by identifying conceptual mismatches. Concepts are mental structures. Words and phrases are the linguistic representatives of concepts. Due to the inherent conciseness of natural language, words can represent multiple concepts and different words may represent the same or very similar concepts. Word sense disambiguation attempts to resolve this ambiguity using contextual information. The use of an ontology facilitates identification of related concepts and their linguistic representatives given a key concept. Latent semantic analysis, on the other hand, attempts to reveal the hidden conceptual relationships among words and phrases based on linguistic usage patterns. In this work we explore the potential of concept-based information access via these two methods. We examine under what circumstances concept-based access becomes feasible and improves user experience.