A concept-based approach is expected to resolve the word sense ambiguities in information retrieval and apply the semantic importance of the concepts, instead of the term frequency, to representing the contents of a document. Consequently, a formalized document framework is proposed. The document framework is used to express the meaning of a document with the concepts which are expressed by high semantic importance. The framework consists of two parts： the ＂domain＂ information and the ＂situation ＆ background＂ information of a document. A document-extracting algorithm and a two-stage smoothing method are also proposed. The quantification of the similarity between the query and the document framework depends on the smoothing method. The experiments on the TREC6 collection demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach in information retrieval tasks. The average recall level precision of the model using the proposed approach is about 10% higher than that of traditional ones.
