Search Engine Query Expansion Using Japanese WordNet

Nowadays, Internet users are familiar with the Web searching process; and searching is the most common task performed on the Web. However, the web search is especially difficult for beginners when they try to utilize a keyword query language. Subsequently, beginners usually try to find information with ambiguous queries. Users receive non-relevant information in response to queries. Our goal is to make the search process more convenient for them. We assume that top ranked returned pages are relevant to the user query. We find the most important terms on these pages. In addition to that, we get synonyms and hypernyms for the terms of the user query utilizing Japanese WordNet. We combine the aforementioned words together and this expanded query is then submitted to the search engine. These operations are done automatically by our prototype, so that the web searching process is easier for beginners. The experimental results showed that our query expansion technique can improve the search performance and has several advantages.