Integrating Boolean queries in conjunctive normal form with probabilistic retrieval models

• Published in: Information processing & management Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 315 - 321
• Main Authors: Losee, Robert M., Bookstein, Abraham
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 1988; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Boolean; Boolean strategies; Computerised information retrieval; Computerized information storage and retrieval; Information retrieval; Information storage and retrieval; Information work; Mathematical analysis; Online information retrieval; Output; Probability; Ranking; Ratings & rankings; Searches; Searching; Statistical analysis; Strategies; Subject indexing; Technical services
• ISSN: 0306-4573; 1873-5371
• DOI: 10.1016/0306-4573(88)90097-0

Most commercial document retrieval systems require queries to be valid Boolean expressions that may be used to split the set of available documents into a subset consisting of documents to be retrieved and a subset of documents not to be retrieved. Research has suggested that the ranking of documents and use of relevance feedback may significantly improve retrieval performance. We suggest that by placing Boolean database queries into Conjunctive Normal Form, a conjunction of disjunctions, and by making the assumption that the disjunctions represent a hyperfeature, documents to be retrieved can be probabilistically ranked and relevance feedback incorporated, improving retrieval performance. Experimental results compare the performance of a sequential learning probabilistic retrieval model with both the proposed integrated Boolean-probabilistic model and with a fuzzy-set model.