A Document Retrieval System Using the Maximum Entropy Principle and Fuzzy Requests

It becomes more important to construct an information retrieval system that can give flexible responses to variable user's requests in accordance with the evolution of the internet. We proposed a document retrieval system based on the maximum entropy principle on a Bayesian network (Saito, et al. 1998). We can claim two advantages for this document retrieval system. The first is that this system can produce several candidates of keywords which will help a user in retrieving a useful document, even if he can not recall a group of adequate keywords. The second is that this system can be customized corresponding to an individual user by tuning the parameters of a Bayesian network. But there is a problem for this system that it does not produce a retrieval result for some combinations of keywords. We have solved this problem, in this paper, by introducing fuzzy requests.