Conceptual information retrieval using RUBRIC

The problem of retrieving information from large full-text databases is unblquitous and increasing in importance as lowcost optical storage media become available. In many cases, simple keyword-based retrieval systems have shown themselves inadequate for the task and a number of more or less sophisticated alternatives have been proposed. Of particular interest are those tha t derive from efforts in natural language understanding and which advocate a conceptually oriented approach (Schank et aL, 1981; DeJong, 1982; Kolodner, 1983). These efforts emphasize semantically driven text parsing with the goal of understanding only so much of the text as is necessary to perform satisfactory retrieval.