During the past couple of months, I have been trying to come up with an efficient way of constructing synonym rings for query expansion in a library discovery system (i.e., the online search interface of a library). I am doing this because I was given a list of e-books on the subject of Digital Humanities (DH) with the purpose of making them more discoverable on KU Leuven Libraries’ discovery platform. In my previous blogpost, I described what synonym rings are, but simply put, you can think of them as groups of similar words and phrases that should be treated as equivalent for the purpose of information retrieval. An example can be found in Figure 1, where each line forms a different synonym ring. If a user enters a search term that can be found in one of the rings, the rest of the words in the ring will also be added to the query and, thus, the query will be expanded. In this blogpost, my goal is to briefly explain the method that I chose to tackle the task of synonym ring construction.
