A Logical Relational Approach for Information Retrieval Indexing

Iadh Ounis, Theo Huibers
1997 unpublished
In a relational indexing approach (see e.g. Farradane's work), information is carried by a fixed set of relationship types over an underlying set of terms. The idea is that the essence of the meaning of information is encapsulated in the relationships between terms. The importance of relationships is now widely recognized within many fields such as relational databases and knowledge representation formalisms. These fields have substantially improved our understanding of relationships and the
more » ... blems involved in trying to formalize them. However, although those relationships can be correctly represented by almost all the well-known formalisms in such fields, they are not exploited as much as the objects by concrete operations. In information retrieval, previous attempts at managing relationships have mainly addressed structural aspects, and exclude the manipulation of index expressions by relational operations. This paper suggests a prime use of the relation properties through a logical framework, in a way that it can improve the effectiveness of the matching operation. Introduction Computer systems are becoming increasingly complex. This is certainly valid for information retrieval systems. With the explosive growth of the amount of information available via the Internet, the high perceived value of multimedia information (texts, graphics, images, video, etc.) and the emergence of new applications such as digital libraries and hypermedia, there has been a strong need for new techniques and models to access this information and to improve the effectiveness of the retrieval process. More and more approaches (theoretical and practical) are being investigated in order to expand the boundary of information retrieval. For instance the field of logic-based information retrieval [1, 2, 3, 4] is broadening rapidly as a theoretical framework for studying information retrieval. The use of logic can provide all the necessary tools to model the different functions of an information retrieval system, and in addition, seem to be a more accurate model of information. Furthermore, a logic provides the possibility to explain the information retrieval performance or behavior [4] . Despite all novel approaches the fundaments of an information retrieval system remain the same. An information BCS IR Colloquium, 1997
doi:10.14236/ewic/ir1997.7 fatcat:567oslnu3zfdpagohetawxgsue