Reducing the dependency of having prior domain knowledge for effective online information retrieval

Abstract

AbstractSometimes Internet users struggle to find what they are looking for on the Internet due to information overload. Search engines intend to identify documents related to a given keyphrase on the Internet and provide suggestions. Having some background knowledge about a topic or a domain will help in building effective search keyphrases that will lead to accurate results in information retrieval. This is further pronounced among students that rely on the internet to learn about a new topic. Students might not have the required background knowledge to build effective keyphrases and find what they are looking for. In this research, we are addressing this problem, and aim to help students find relevant information online. This research furthers existing literature by enhancing information retrieval frameworks through keyphrase assignment, aiming to expose students to new terminologies, therefore reducing the dependency of having background knowledge about the domain under study. We evaluated this framework and identified how it can be enhanced to suggest more effective search keyphrases. Our proposed suggestion is to introduce a keyphrase Ranking Mechanism that will improve the keyphrase assignment part of the framework by taking into consideration the part‐of‐speech of the generated keyphrases. To evaluate the proposed approach, various data sets were downloaded and processed. The results obtained showed that our proposed approach produces more effective keyphrases than the existing framework.