Exploring semantic constraints for document retrieval

In this paper, we explore the use of structured content as semantic constraints for enhancing the performance of traditional term-based document retrieval in special domains. First, we describe a method for automatic extraction of semantic content in the form of attribute-value (AV) pairs from natural language texts based on domain models constructed from a semi-structured web resource. Then, we explore the effect of combining a state-of-the-art term-based IR system and a simple constraint-based search system that uses the extracted AV pairs. Our evaluation results have shown that such combination produces some improvement in IR performance over the term-based IR system on our test collection.