A general model of query processing in information retrieval systems

摘要

Most current document retrieval systems require that user queries be specified in the form of Boolean expressions. Although Boolean queries work, they have flaws. Some of the attempts to overcome these flaws have involved “partial-match” retrieval or the use of fuzzy-subset theory. Recently, some generalizations of fuzzy-subset theory have been suggested that would allow the user to specify queries with relevance weights or thresholds attached to terms. The various query-processing methods are discussed and compared.