Flexible Querying of Structured Documents

Abstract

In this paper a flexible query language for expressing soft selection conditions on structured documents is presented and formalized within fuzzy set theory. Documents are represented as entities structured into logical sections in which the index terms play a distinct role. Users can indicate the preferred sections of documents, i.e., those which they estimate bearing the most interesting information, as well as quantify the number of sections which determine the global potential interest of the documents. A linguistic quantifier that specifies the approximate number of the sections in which the query terms should appear in the relevant documents expresses this last information.