Abstract—In the literature, the bag-of-concepts
representation of textual documents is regarded as a convenient
alternative to the bag-of-words representation, since the words
that users choose as search terms may differ from the ones that
the author of a particular document chose for referring to the
same concept—thus reducing recall. Besides, the bag-of-words
representation does not detect the differences of context in
ambiguous terms, what reduces precision in search results. The
objective of our research is to evaluate the applicability of the
bag-of-concepts paradigm to information retrieval of educational
resources. We built an information retrieval system that follows
that approach and evaluated it with final users. The main
contribution of this paper is the description of the architecture of
the information retrieval system. First evaluation results show
that the information retrieval system based on bag-of-concepts
works well for retrieving educational resources. The practical
implications of this research are that: it demonstrates that it is
workable to build information retrieval systems based on bag-ofconcepts
and that they are efficient for retrieving educational
resources. This makes them an a priori interesting alternative to
be applied in other domains.