WordNet distinguishes four different kinds of relations. The nature of the semantic relation affects the expansion reliability. The weight associated to a term recovered from a multi-step exploration of the thesaurus is a combination of weights associated to the links along the path going from this term to the initial term and is computed as the product of these weights. Note that the measure of the relevance for any term retrieved from WordNet depends on . As a matter of fact, identifying any synset related to a given term requires a prior selection for the meaning of that term i.e. using a synonymy link.
Query expansion results for the query term wood .
In that kind of situation, we keep the higher weight, in this case.