The Learning Systems Department at Siemens Corporate Research is investigating the use of concept spaces to increase retrieval effectiveness. Similar to a semantic net, a concept space is a construct that defines the semantic relationships among ideas. The current focus of our research is to exploit the information in such a structure to ameliorate known shortcomings of statistical retrieval methods while maintaining the statistical methods' robustness. Our initial concept space is extracted from WordNet, a manually-constructed lexical database developed at Princeton University.