Information Retrieval from Unstructured Arabic Legal Data

Given the steady increase of published and stored information in the form of Arabic unstructured texts, current Information Retrieval (IR) systems must be able to suit the nature and requirements of this language for an accurate and efficient search. This paper sheds light on the challenges in Arabic IR (AIR) and proposes an approach for enhancing the process of AIR based on transforming these texts into structured documents in XML format through a document ontology as well as a set of linguistic grammars. The IR system hence is done on the XML documents. The aim of such system is to incorporate the knowledge on the document structure and on specific content elements in computing the relevance of an information element. A query expansion module mainly based on domain ontology as well as user profile is proposed for the enhancement of the search results.