In this paper some research trends in the field of Information Retrieval are presented. The focus is on the definition of flexible systems, i.e. systems that can represent and manage the vagueness and uncertainty which is characteristic of the process of information searching and retrieval. In this paper the application of soft computing techniques is considered, in particular fuzzy set theory.
In this paper we present a fuzzy model for representing documents having a hierarchical structure and possibly containing multimedia information. We consider an archive containing documents with distinct (heterogeneous) logical structures. We also propose a flexible query language for expressing soft selection conditions on the structured documents. The documents’ content is organized into thematic (topical) sections where the index terms play a distinct role. The proposed document representation...
Fuzzy data mining by means of the fuzzy decision tree method enables the construction of a set of fuzzy rules. Such a rule set can be associated with a database as a knowledge base that can be used to help answering frequent queries. In this paper, a study is done that enables us to show that classification by means of a fuzzy decision tree is equivalent to the generalized modus ponens. Moreover, it is shown that the decision taken by means of a fuzzy decision tree is more stable when observation...
The term query is widely used in the database as well as information retrieval communities. Basically, a query against a collection of information items (to be called later, for brevity, an information source) provides a formal description of the items of interest to the user posing this query. A source of information is meant here very generally. It may take the form of an archive of multimedia or textual documents, a database, or a knowledge base. In the three previous examples the information...
A flexible query model is presented for semi-structured information stored in well-formed XML documents, modeled as XML fuzzy graphs by computing estimates of the importance of the information associated to XML elements and attributes. The notion of fuzzy graph closure with threshold is then used to obtain a fuzzy extension of the XML fuzzy graphs’ topological structure. Weights associated to closure arcs are computed as a conjunction of the importance values of the underlying arcs in the original...