• Journal of Information Management
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.137-154
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• 2011

A headword finding system is defined as an information retrieval system using a word gloss as a query. We use the gloss as a document in order to implement such a system. Generally the gloss is very short in length and then makes very difficult to find the most proper headword for a given query. To alleviate this problem, we expand the document using the concept of query expansion in information retrieval. In this paper, we use 2 document expansion methods : gloss expansion and similar word expansion. The former is the process of inserting glosses of words, which include in the document, into a seed document. The latter is also the process of inserting similar words into a seed document. We use a featureless clustering algorithm for getting the similar words. The performance (r-inclusion rate) amounts to almost 100% when the queries are word glosses and r is 16, and to 66.9% when the queries are written in person by users. Through several experiments, we have observed that the document expansions are very useful for the headword finding system. In the future, new measures including the r-inclusion rate of our proposed measure are required for performance evaluation of headword finding systems and new evaluation sets are also needed for objective assessment.