INFORMATION RETRIEVAL BY LOGICAL IMAGING

Abstract

The evaluation of an implication by Imaging is a logical technique developed in the framework of modal logic. Its interpretation in the context of a ‘possible worlds’ semantics is very appealing for ir. In 1989, Van Rijsbergen suggested its use for solving one of the fundamental problems of logical models of IR: the evaluation of the implication d → q (where d and q are respectively a document and a query representation). Since then, others have tried to follow that suggestion proposing models and applications, though without much success. Most of these approaches had as their basic assumption the consideration that ‘a document is a possible world’. We propose instead an approach based on a completely different assumption: ‘a term is a possible world’. This approach enables the exploitation of term‐term relationships which are estimated using an information theoretic measure.