On document relevance and lexical cohesion between query terms

Lexical cohesion is a property of text, achieved through lexical-semantic relations between words in text. Most information retrieval systems make use of lexical relations in text only to a limited extent. In this paper we empirically investigate whether the degree of lexical cohesion between the contexts of query terms' occurrences in a document is related to its relevance to the query. Lexical cohesion between distinct query terms in a document is estimated on the basis of the lexical-semantic relations (repetition, synonymy, hyponymy and sibling) that exist between there collocates - words that co-occur with them in the same windows of text. Experiments suggest significant differences between the lexical cohesion in relevant and non-relevant document sets exist. A document ranking method based on lexical cohesion shows some performance improvements. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.