Word sense disambiguation to improve precision for ambiguous queries

Success in Information Retrieval (IR) depends on many variables. Several interdisciplinary approaches try to improve the quality of the results obtained by an IR system. In this paper we propose a new way of using word sense disambiguation (WSD) in IR. The method we develop is based on Naive Bayes classification and can be used both as a filtering and as a re-ranking technique. We show on the TREC ad-hoc collection that WSD is useful in the case of queries which are difficult due to sense ambiguity. Our interest regards improving the precision after 5, 10 and 30 retrieved documents (P@5, P@10, P@30), respectively, for such lowest precision queries.