Experiments with automatic indexing and a relational thesaurus in a Chinese information retrieval system

This article describes a series of experiments with an interactive Chinese information retrieval system named CIRS and an interactive relational thesaurus. Two important issues have been explored: whether thesauri enhance the retrieval effectiveness of Chinese documents, and whether automatic indexing can compete with manual indexing in a Chinese information retrieval system. Recall and precision are used to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the system. Statistical analysis of the recall and precision measures suggest that the use of the relational thesaurus does improve the retrieval effectiveness both in the automatic indexing environment and in the manual indexing environment and that automatic indexing is at least as goad as manual indexing.