As the number of available Web pages grows, users experience increasing difficulty finding documents relevant to their interests. One of the underlying reasons for this is that most search engines find matches based on keywords, regardless of their meanings. To provide the user with more useful information, we need a system that includes information about the conceptual frame of the queries as well as its keywords. This is the goal of KeyConcept, a search engine that retrieves documents based on a combination of keyword and conceptual matching. Documents are automatically classified to determine the concepts to which they belong. In this first phase of the project, query concepts are determined automatically from a small description of the query or explicitly entered by the user. In the near future, concepts will be determined by means of a user profile; in this way, the system will be able to provide search results more relevant to the user's current activities and tasks.

For questions or comments, send email to sgauch@ittc.ku.edu

Related Papers

Personalizing Search based on User Search Histories, Mirco Speretta and Susan Gauch, Thirteenth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2004), (submitted).

Exploiting Hierarchical Relationships in Conceptual Search, Devanand Ravindran and Susan Gauch, Thirteenth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2004), (submitted).

Improving Ontology-Based User Profiles," Joana Trajkova and Susan Gauch, RIAO 2004, University of Avignon (Vaucluse), France, April 26-28, 2004, pp. 380-389.

"Hierarchical Text Classification," Ashwin Pulijala and Susan Gauch, International Conference on Cybernetics and Information Technologies, Systems and Applications: CITSA 2004, Orlando, FL, July 21 - 25, 2004.(to appear)

"Contextual Information Retrieval Using Ontology-Based User Profiles," Vishnu Challam and Susan Gauch.

"KeyConcept: A Conceptual Search Engine," Susan Gauch, Juan M. Madrid, Subhash Induri, Devanand Ravindran, and Sriram Chadlavada, Information and Telecommunication Technology Center, Technical Report: ITTC-FY2004-TR-8646-37, University of Kansas.

Last update: 13-June-2004