The Impact of Ontology on the Performance of Information Retrieval: A Case of WordNet

Abstract

The debate on the effectiveness of ontology in solving semantic problems has increased recently in many domains of information technology. One side of the debate accepts the inclusion of ontology as a suitable solution. The other side of the debate argues that ontology is far from an ideal solution to the semantic problem. This article explores this debate in the area of information retrieval. Several past approaches were explored and a new approach was investigated to test the effectiveness of a generic ontology such as WordNet in improving the performance of information retrieval systems. The test and the analysis of the experiments suggest that WordNet is far from the ideal solution in solving semantic problems in the information retrieval. However, several observations have been made and reported in this article that allow research in ontology for the information retrieval to move towards the right direction.