An Algorithm for Modelling Key Terms

The ability to formally analyse and represent semantic relations of terms is a major challenge for many areas of computing science and an intriguing problem for other sciences. In applications of evidence theory to, for instance, information retrieval, the problem of analysis and representation becomes apparent because evidence theory is based on set theory and individual key terms have to be modelled as subsets of the frame of discernment. How to find the frame and model the key terms is a challenge. The problem leads to other practical problems, as pointed out repeatedly in the literature. In this study, we focus on such a problem, present a method for simplifying and normalizing a thesaurus, and propose an algorithm for establishing the frame of discernment and for modelling individual key terms as a subset of the frame. The key aim of this study is to treat semantic relations of terms by means of a normalized thesaurus.