The Use of Arabic WordNet in Arabic Information Retrieval

Research and experimentation using Arabic WordNet in the field of information retrieval are relatively new. It is limited compared to the research that has been done using Princeton WordNet. This work attempts to study the impact of Arabic WordNet on the performance of Arabic information retrieval. We extend Lucene with Arabic WordNet to expand user's queries. The major contribution of this study is to propose an interactive query expansion (IQE) methodology using the word's part-of-speech, according to the part it plays in a query. First, the user selects the appropriate part of speech for each term in the original query, and then he reselects the appropriate synonyms. Experimental results show that our IQE strategy produces a good Mean Average Precision (MAP), it is able to improve MAP by 12.6%, but no variant of automatic query expansion (AQE) strategies did. Nevertheless, the experiments allow us to conclude that with an appropriate use of Arabic WordNet as a source of linguistic information for AQE can improve effectiveness for Arabic information retrieval.