Possibility and necessity measures for relevance assessment

Abstract

The major question raised in information retrieval on semi-structured documents relates to the manner of effectively handling the structure and the contents of the document for better answering the user's needs. These needs can be formulated by queries composed of only key words or key words and structural constraints. In this paper, we are interested in Information Retrieval in semi-structured document like XML. For these purposes, we present a model for the semi-structured information retrieval, based on the possibilistic networks. The document - elements and elements - terms relations are modelled by measures of possibility and necessity. In this model, the user's query starts a process of propagation to recover documents or portions of documents necessarily or at least possibly relevant. An example of such a research is proposed in order to illustrate the presented approach.