Abstract:In the context of arabic Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) guided by arabic ontology and to enable those systems to better respond to user requirements, this paper aims to representing documents and queries by the best concepts extracted from Arabic Wordnet. Identified concepts belonging to Arabic WordNet synsets are extracted from documents and queries, and those having a single sense are expanded. The expanded query is then used by the IRS to retrieve the relevant documents searched. Our experiments are based primarily on a medium size corpus of arabic text. The results obtained shown us that there are a global improvement in the performance of the arabic IRS.