Independent document ranking for E-learning using semantic-based document term classification

Abstract

Massive digital documents on Internet leading to use e-learning, and it becomes an emerging field of research due to the massive growth of internet users. E-learning requires suitable document ranking method to avoid navigating to the next Search Engine Result Page (SERP) frequently. The existing document ranking methods are lacking to rank the documents independently based on the conceptual contents. This paper proposes a novel method for ranking the documents independently based on the different classification of term it contains. In this approach, the terms are classified into five categories such as (1) direct query term, (2) expanded terms, (3) semantically related term, (4) supporting terms and (5) stop words. The query has been expanded using domain ontology to acquire more semantic terms for better understanding of user query. The semantic weight has been applied independently over different categories of terms in a document for ranking. The document with the highest augmented value in each category of terms has been ranked first. Remaining documents are ranked in the same way and are arranged in the descending order. The WordNet tool is utilized as a knowledge base and Wu and Palmer semantic distance method have applied for measuring semantic distance between the query and document terms for ranking the terms. The experiments show that the performance of the proposed document ranking method for e-learning retrieved better document compared with existing document ranking methods.