Query expansion in an abductive information retrieval system
Adrian Müller, Ulrich Thiel · 1994
The problem of automatic query expansion is studied in the context of a logic-based information retrieval system that employs - in contrast to approaches based on deductive reasoning - an abductive inference engine. Given a query, the abduction process yields a set of possible expansions to the query. An architecture for an interactive retrieval system based on abduction is proposed comprising a schema-level representation of the documents' contents and structure, an abductive retrieval engine, and a user interface which allows to control the inference process. The retrieval engine was tested on a collection of SGML-structured texts. We report on experimental results in the last section of the paper. 1 Introduction An increasing demand for end-user oriented retrieval systems motivated a lot of research on methods for automatic query expansion in IR. In most cases, the approaches are based on vector space or probabilistic IR models, for an overview cf [QF93]. In these approach...