Lexical cohesion is a property of text, achieved through lexical-semantic relations between words in text. We investigate whether the degree of lexical cohesion between the contexts of query terms’ occurrences in a document is related to its relevance to the query. Lexical cohesion between distinct query terms in a document is estimated on the basis of the lexical-semantic relations that exist between their collocates – words that co-occur with them in the same windows of text. Experiments suggest significant differences between the lexical cohesion in relevant and non-relevant document sets exist. A document ranking method based on lexical cohesion shows some performance improvements.

DATE: 12 November, 2007, Monday@ 16:15
PLACE: EA 409