Query Expansion for the Legal Domain: A Case Study from the JUMAS Project

This paper presents an ongoing research on the comparison of ontological query expansion methods. Query Expansion is a technique that aims to enhance the results of a search by adding terms to the search query; today, it is a very important research topic in the semantic web and information retrieval areas. Although many efforts have been made from the theoretical point of view to implement effective and general methods for expanding queries, based on both statistical and ontological approaches, the practical applicability of them is nowadays restricted to few and very specific domains. The aim of this paper is the definition of a platform for the implementation of a subset of such methods, in order to make comparisons among them and try to define how and when use ontological QE. This work is part of JUMAS, a research project funded by European Community where query expansion is used to support the retrieval of significant information from audio-video transcriptions in the legal domain