What You Saw Is What You Want: Using Cases to Seed Information Retrieval

This paper presents a hybrid case-based reasoning (CBR) and information retrieval (IR) system, called SPIRE, that both retrieves documents from a full-text document corpus and from within individual documents, and locates passages likely to contain information about important problem-solving features of cases. SPIRE uses two case-bases, one containing past precedents, and one containing excerpts from past case texts. Both are used by SPIRE to automatically generate queries, which are then run by the INQUERY full-text retrieval engine on a large text collection in the case of document retrieval and on individual text documents for passage retrieval.