On the Representation of Query Term Relations by Soft Boolean Operators

The language analysis component in most text retrieval systems is confined to a recognition of noun phrases of the type normally included in back-of-the-book indexes, and an identification of related terms included in a preconstructed thesaurus of quasi-synonyms. Even such a restricted language analysis is fraught with difficulties because of the well-known problems in the analysis of compound nominals, and the hazards and cost of constructing word synonym classes valid for large text samples.In this study an extended (soft) Boolean logic is used for the formulation of information retrieval queries which is capable of representing both the use of compound noun phrases as well as the inclusion of synonym constructions in the query statements. The operations of the extended Boolean logic are described, and evaluation output is included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the extended logic compared with that of ordinary text retrieval systems.

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