What is the tree that we see through the window: A linguistic approach to windowing and term variation

摘要

Windowing techniques play a key role in information retrieval. Previous works have suggested that the quality of access to information relies heavily on the characteristics of the windows. This study provides a linguistic approach to text windowing through an extraction of term variants with the help of a partial parser. The syntactic grounding of the method ensures that words observed within restricted spans are lexically related and that spurious word cooccurrences are ruled out with a good level of confidence. The system, is computationally tractable on large corpora and large lists of terms. Illustrative examples of term variations form a large medical corpus are given. An experimental evaluation of the method shows that only a small proportion of co-occurring words are lexically related and motivates the call for natural language parsing techniques in text windowing.