This project represents an integrated effort by researchers working in the areas of information storage and retrieval, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence (E.A. Fox and J.T. Nutter at Virginia Tech, and N.M. Evans at IIT) to organize lexical knowledge so that more effective interactive information retrieval will be possible. A large English lexicon (i.e., a knowledge base integrating various kinds of information about words, their usage and meaning) will be created, and methods will be developed to use that lexicon to improve the effectiveness of online information retrieval systems. This lexicon will be used as an essential part of experimental tests of two knowledge based information retrieval systems, enabling empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of various approaches to interactively using an English lexicon to support information retrieval. The importance of this research is that the amount of information available today in the form of documents has grown far beyond the ability of any individual person to manage without computer assistance. This work, bringing together strategies from artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and information retrieval, will result in far more powerful, knowledge-based computer systems able to act as intelligent "assistants" to help people effectively access the information available to them in documents.
