Introducing FDSA (Fuzzy Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms): Applications on Information Retrieval and Stand-Alone Use

Abstract

We start by analyzing the role of imprecision in information retrieval in the Web, some theoretical contributions for managing this problem and its presence in search engines, with special emphasis on the use of thesaurus in order to increase the relevance of the documents retrieved. We then present Fdsa, a Spanish electronic dictionary of synonyms that compute degrees of synonymy, and an efficient implementation of it by using deterministic acyclic finite-state automata. We conclude by conjecturing that the use of this e- dictionary in a Spanish web searcher will increase recall without diminishing too much precision and latency. Moreover, our electronic dictionary will be freely available very soon for stand-alone use.