Analysis of retrieval result on ontology-based query reformulation

Abstract

Users normally facing difficulties to expresses their information needs into a query format that the search system can use to process. Therefore users frequently modify their query with intention to retrieve better results. The goal of this experiment is to compare the precision of the retrieved results by employing domain ontology to reformulate the user query. We proposed to reformulate the query (initially in natural language) by replacing it with the terms retrieved from ontology. Then we improve the approach by combining the terms from ontology with keyword/s extracted from the initial user's natural language query. Precision measure had been conducted for six queries and the results showed that the idea of combining ontology terms with keyword from query gave a promising result. It achieved higher precision in comparison when using ontology terms alone. This experimental result indicates that query reformulation is more efficient when ontology term/s combined with key element from the user's query.