Page 120 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

Construction and usage of terminology services for

information retrieval ①a

*
OU Shiyan①b① , TANG Zhengui & SU Feifei
School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China

Abstract
In information retrieval, thesauri have increasingly become vital as an aid to effective retrieval. In the
networked environment, terminology services become an ideal way to employ thesauri in application
systems. However, most of existing projects or systems focused mainly on the construction of
terminology services and seldom gave attention to their usage. The overall purpose of this study is to
investigate the construction of terminology services and their usage. Firstly, taking Chinese Thesaurus
as a source vocabulary, a system was built with the use of REST architecture and Semantic Web
technologies. After the construction of terminology services, this study used the above mentioned
six terminology services to investigate the usage of terminology services in information retrieval
systems based on the embedded client. Taking the getSynonym service as an example, the usefulness
of terminology services was tested with an experiment of 30 user queries to the library OPAC system
and Baidu Search Engine. OPAC’s experiment results showed that the average recall increases 26.7%
while the average precision decreases 4.6%. Baidu’s experiment results showed that the P@5 precision
increases 16%. Four usage modes were designed, including multiple choice for query expansion,
single choice for query replacement, hybrid of query expansion and replacement, and automatic query
expansion. To evaluate their usability, a user testing was carried out in the library OPAC system and
Baidu Search Engine with 24 human subjects based on four usability criteria (effectiveness, efficiency,
user satisfaction and learnability). The evaluation results showed that multiple choice for query
expansion was the best usage mode which is more effective, easier to use, easier to learn, and has higher
user satisfaction.

Keywords
Information retrieval, Thesaurus, Terminology registry, Terminology services, REST architecture,
Usefulness, Usability, Analytic Hierarchy Process

0 Introduction

In information retrieval, thesauri provide precise, general-purpose controlled terms for document
indexing and retrieval to help improve consistency between indexing and query languages, and
thus have increasingly become vital as an aid to effective retrieval. With the rapid development
of the World Wide Web and the increasing richness of network resources, there is a trend to apply

①a This article is an outcome of the project “Research on the Construction and Application of SOA-based Terminology Registry and
Terminology Services” (No.11BT0023）supported by National Social Science Foundation of China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to OU Shiyan，Email：oushiyan@nju.edu.cn，ORCID：0000-0001-8617-6987