Development and use of Japan Agricultural Thesaurus to assist in searching for agriculture research information

Abstract

This paper describes the Japan Agricultural Thesaurus (JAT) and its use. Terms were collected from academic dictionaries and others in the Japanese agricultural research fields, and AGROVOC, a multilingual thesaurus in Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. JAT has both broader / narrower and equivalence relationships between terms according to AGROVOC. We faced some problems with JAT such as 1) Japanese terms with multiple translations in English, 2) English terms with multiple translations in Japanese, 3) many Japanese notations of scientific names, and 4) many orthographic variants. Both morpheme and synonym dictionaries developed from JAT were utilized in existing systems, because improved accuracy in morpheme analysis and retrieval of relevant information respectively. JAT is available for free.