Abstract In this study, the effectiveness of different kinds of vocabulary resources for Chinese information retrieval are examined and compared based on interactions between users and the information retrieval system. We use traditional thesaurus, statistical thesaurus, and ontology to carry out a series of experiments for detailed investigation. The NTCIR5 test collection is used as the benchmark, which is composed of topic set, document set, and answer set. In order to make the study much more targeted, 25 queries with Chinese only are extracted and examined from totally 50 queries in NTCIR5 topic sets. The experimental results show that the statistical thesaurus greatly increases the number of improved queries, but ontology greatly increases the retrieval performance. Traditional thesaurus shows the poorest performance among these vocabulary resources. We also find that the users with good experience in information retrieval do well utilize vocabulary resources, and produce good retrieval results. In addition, all vocabulary resources do help Type-II queries, i.e., queries with simple concepts and non-specific temporal and spacial scope.