Improving Interoperability Using Query Interpretation in Semantic Vector Spaces

In semantic web applications where query initiators and information providers do not necessarily share the same ontology, semantic interoperability generally relies on ontology matching or schema mappings. Information exchange is then not only enabled by the established correspondences (the “shared” parts of the ontologies) but, in some sense, limited to them. Then, how the “unshared” parts can also contribute to and improve information exchange ? In this paper, we address this question by considering a system where documents and queries are represented by semantic vectors. We propose a specific query expansion step at the query initiator’s side and a query interpretation step at the document provider’s. Through these steps, unshared concepts contribute to evaluate the relevance of documents wrt. a given query. Our experiments show an important improvement of retrieval relevance when concepts of documents and queries are not shared. Even if the concepts of the initial query are not shared by the document provider, our method still ensures 90% of the precision and recall obtained when the concepts are shared.