Discovering the semantics of user keywords

The technology in the field of digital media generates huge amounts of textual information every day, so mechanisms to retrieve relevant information are needed. Under these circumstances, many times current web search engines do not provide users with the information they seek, because these search tools mainly use syntax based techniques. However, search engines based on semantic and context information can help overcome some of the limitations of current alternatives. In this paper, we propose a system that takes as input a list of plain keywords provided by a user and translates them into a query expressed in a formal language without ambiguity. Our system discovers the semantics of user keywords by consulting the knowledge represented by many (heterogeneous and distributed) ontologies. Then, context information is used to remove ambiguity and build the most probable query. Our experiments indicate that our system discovers the user's information need better than traditional search engines when the semantics of the request is not the most popular on the Web.