Linguistic Systems

9.6 Summary

This chapter has shown that while a great deal has been learned about language and the ability of computer systems to understand it, there are still significant barriers to using NLP to enhance IR systems. It is not clear that linguistic approaches will be able to outperform the state-of-the-art lexical-statistical approaches from Chapter 8 in ad hoc retrieval, although further research is still warranted. Promising results may occur in retrieval applications of other types, such as CLIR and question answering.