Determining the Impact of Domain Independent Ontology over Transactional User Queries

Abstract

Searching has become part and parcel of our human life. This has been possible because of the significant improvement that has happened in the field of information retrieval. Any Information Retrieval application can be considered as a collection of different components namely Query Interface where the user enters their information need, the document representation which is done using the indexing process, the matching process which compares the query and the document representation that is available in the index, and finally the ranking process which arranges the documents according to their user query relevance. Lot of work has been done by commercial search engine organizations to make searching a rewarding experience to the users. One such area is to know the user intention behind the queries that is being given in the query interface. Based on the user intention, user queries are being classified as informational, navigational and transactional queries. To make queries more responsive for Information Retrieval, Query Refinement can be done on the individual queries. In recent times ontology has been used in query refinement process and many studies in this area has shown considerable improvement with respect to the results retrieved. In this paper we would like to study the impact of Domain independent ontology in the query refinement process involving transactional queries.