Conceptual Search for Arabic Web Content

Abstract

The main reason of adopting Semantic Web technology in information retrieval is to improve the retrieval performance. A semantic search-based system is characterized by locating web contents that are semantically related to the query’s concepts rather than relying on the exact matching with keywords in queries. There is a growing interest in Arabic web content worldwide due to its importance for culture, political aspect, strategic location, and economics. Arabic is linguistically rich across all levels which makes the effective search of Arabic text a challenge. In the literature, researches that address searching the Arabic web content using semantic web technology are still insufficient compared to Arabic’s actual importance as a language. In this research, we propose an Arabic semantic search approach that is applied on Arabic web content. This approach is based on the Vector Space Model (VSM), which has proved its success and many researches have been focused on improving its traditional version. Our approach uses the Universal WordNet to build a rich concept-space index instead of the traditional term-space index. This index is used for enabling a Semantic VSM capabilities. Moreover, we introduced a new incidence measurement to calculate the semantic significance degree of the concept in a document which fits with our model rather than the traditional term frequency. Furthermore, for the purpose of determining the semantic similarity of two vectors, we introduced a new formula for calculating the semantic weight of the concept. Because documents are indexed by their topics and classified semantically, we were able to search Arabic documents effectively. The experimental results in terms of Precision, Recall and F-measure have showed improvement in performance from 77%, 56%, and 63% to 71%, 96%, and 81%, respectively.