Meaningful Results for Information Retrieval in the MEANING Project

The goal of the MEANING project (IST-2001-34460) is to develop tools for the automatic acquisition of lexical knowledge that will help Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). The acquired lexical knowledge from various sources and various languages is stored in the Multilingual Central Repository (MCR) (Atserias et al 04), which is based on the design of the EuroWordNet database. The MCR holds wordnets in various languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Basque), which are interconnected via an Inter-LingualIndex (ILI). In addition, the MCR holds a number of ontologies and domain labels related to all concepts. During the MEANING project, the MCR has been enriched in various cycles. This paper describes the integration and evaluation of the MCR in a commercial classification and (cross-lingual) information retrieval system, developed by Irion Technologies. We carried out a series of task-based evaluations on English and Spanish news collections, for which indexes were built with and without the results of MEANING. The evaluations show that both recall and precision are significantly higher when using the enriched semantic networks in combination with WSD.