Semantic interpretation of conjuncts : boolean transformations
Hemalata Iyer · 1992
This paper reports on an exploratory study of the semantic interpretation of conjuncts and their translation into Boolean search statements, using dictionary definitions. Rules were formulated based on syntactic and semantic analysis of the conjunctive phrases occurring in 160 natural language statements (NLS) of user information needs. This includes a set of transformational rules to accomodate variations in natural language expressions. A heuristic based algorithm, primarily intended to test the applicability of the rules on larger samples on NLS, was developped. Evaluation of the rules was performed by matching the ouput of the algorithm with the search formulation done by an expert online searcher.