Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with locating documents that are relevant for user’s information need or query from large collection documents. Many techniques and tools have been developed to improve this process. One of these tools is thesaurus. My study examines both early and current approaches to automatic thesaurus construction and describes approaches to the automatic generation of thesaurus.

My study will present a thesaurus construction system, referred to as WorkBench Thesaurus Construction (WBThes), which can be used as a tool for users to build thesauri according to their own requirements. The main goal is to design a comprehensive thesaurus building tool that can be used in any speciality field. The system must provide sufficient structure to represent different relationships among concepts and terms as well as to extract these relationships. In addition a thesaurus builder can also use different methods to extract terms and relation between them from document corpus. So, the system provides a set of interface functions through which the user can easily build a thesaurus.

I am a PhD student in Laboratory of Applied Epistemology at the University of Gent. My promoters are Prof. DR. F. Vandamme and Prof. Dr. R. Boute.

I received my BS in Computer Science from Yarmouk University - Jordan (1984) and a MS degree in Computer Engineering from the Middle East Technical University -Turkey(1991).

My research interests include Thesaurus Construction, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Knowledge Acquisition, Expert System Maintenance, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning