Evaluating lexical variant generation to improve information retrieval

Techniques for managing lexical variation constitute an integral part of information retrieval systems. We report on a series of experiments aimed at evaluating LVG, a lexical variant management tool which addresses the particular problems involved in matching health related vocabularies to concepts in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. Experiments conducted on data from the Large Scale Vocabulary Test indicate the effectiveness of this approach to managing biomedical information.