Using WordNet to disambiguate word senses for text retrieval
SIGIR '93 Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Non-parametric significance tests of retrieval performance comparisons
Journal of Information Science
Consistency in the selection of search concepts and search terms
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue on history of information science
Exploiting a controlled vocabulary to improve collection selection and retrieval effectiveness
Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Information and knowledge management
Bibliographic database access using free-text and controlled vocabulary: an evaluation
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
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Searching specialized collections, such as biomedical literature, typically requires intimate knowledge of a specialized terminology. Hence, it can be a disappointing experience: not knowing the right terms to use and being unaware of synonyms or variations in terminology might result in low recall scores. We study the role of a thesaurus in the biomedical information retrieval process. We start by giving a description of vocabulary mismatch problems between natural language queries and relevant documents in biomedical literature search; we provide a detailed case study and observe the impact of vocabulary mismatch problems on retrieval effectiveness. Additionally, we analyze the associated MeSH thesaurus terms used to index the documents in the collection. Based on our observations, we propose a method for exploiting the MeSH thesaurus to improve retrieval effectiveness and, more specifically, to increase recall. We carry out a series of thesaurus-based retrieval experiments that show substantial performance improvements. We conclude with a detailed analysis of the retrieval results.