Query expansion using thesaurus in improving Malay Hadith retrieval system

Thesaurus has become another valuable structure in any Information Retrieval system. It is a list of terms and concepts that provide a controlled vocabulary of words to use in document indexing, clustering, searching and retrieval. This paper present the results of expanding user's query using Malay thesaurus in the process of searching Malay documents from Malay Hadith retrieval system. The results obtained shows that the retrieval effectiveness improves by four percent when thesaurus is employed in the process of retrieving Malay translated Hadith documents, compared to when single term queries are employed.