Some linguistic methods of improving the quality of document retrieval on the internet

Abstract

One of the problems of e-Business is to find relevant documents for making correct decisions. The main problem of the Internet is the huge amount of documents that makes it difficult to find the relevant ones, hence the importance of the methods allowing for improving the quality of document retrieval. We discuss some linguistic problems of document retrieval on the Internet related to the following natural language phenomena: (1) morphological processes: e.g., takes, took, taken are grammar forms of take, (2) polysemy and homonymy: most words have several senses, e.g., bank is a financial institution, shore, bench, etc., (3) non-linearity of syntactic relations: in case of a query that contains word combinations, the words forming a word combination can be separated by other words in the documents. Some linguistic-based methods and strategies related to the discussed problems are proposed that improve the quality of document retrieval or show the necessity of application of linguistic methods.