Interactive retrieval office documents

Office information systems are being used to describe and store documents with complex structure and multimedia content. Users of these systems can potentially make very complex specifications of the structure, layout and content of the documents they wish to retrieve. Although these complex queries could be more effective in identifying relevant documents, it is important that a well-defined model of retrieval is used, both as the basis for the retrieval strategies and the user interface. In this paper, we present a system (OFFICER) for the retrieval of office documents that is based on a model of plausible inference. The OFFICER query interface allows the specification of uncertain queries and combines uncertainties in the matching of queries and documents to produce an overall ranking for the documents.