The effect of using a thesaurus in Arabic information retrieval system

Automatic query expansion methods for English and other languages text retrieval have been studied for a long time. In this research we study the retrieval effectiveness, achieved when we apply a successful automatic query expansion method in Arabic text retrieval based on an automatic thesaurus. Our experiments show that the automatic query expansion method resulted in a notable improvement in Arabic text retrieval using a sample of abstracts of Arabic documents. The study showed that the use of a thesaurus has improved information retrieval system by 10% -20%. The study also shows that the greater the number of documents in the building thesaurus, Thesaurus was more accurate.