A Rule-Based Approach to Information Retrieval: Some Results and Comments

This paper is a report of our early efforts to use a rule-based approach in the information retrieval task. We have developed a prototype system that allows the user to specify his or her retrieval concept as a hierarchy of sub-concepts which are then implemented as a set of production rules. The paper contains a brief description of the system and some of the preliminary testing we have done. In particular, we make some observations on the need for an appropriate language for expressing conceptual queries, and on the interactions between rule formulation and uncertainty representation.