The effectiveness of thesaurus query approach in document retrieval / Noor Sharoni Arifin

This project incorporates the thesaurus approach in documents retrieval. In
information retrieval, the common information retrieval model is by using traditional
simple query as the query task. An important issue is that most query language use
the context and the structure of the text to find relevant documents. In that sense, the
system may fail to find relevant answer in order to get the appropriate document.
Beside that, limitation of traditional query can result in losing a lot of the relevant
dociunent. But, using thesaurus techniques in searching, it will find the words that
contain the same meaning with user query. Using thesaurus can help user to get the
result in shorter time. It is because user can use this approach to find other relevant
document. Users do not necessary to think the other word and then query in query
form in order to get the resuh. This project is constructed to develop a prototype for
the document retrieval which considering the thesaurus query and retrieval approach
and evaluate the effectiveness. The query language that has been used in this project
is Visual Basic. NET and for the database is Microsoft SQL Server 2000. An
experiment is conducted by using direct query as the benchmark, to evaluate the
effectiveness of thesaurus query. 50 of FTMSK official letters is taken as the test
document and 10 queries are been used to the retrieval system. From this project, the
result of the experiment shows that thesaurus query is effective but not efficient
compared to direct query.