How to Retrieve Relevant Information?

Relevant information is required in all kinds of information-based systems. It is not a triv-ial task to locate the right piece of informa-tion since it may be difficult (or impossible) specify query requests precisely and completely. Thus, a flexible retrieval algorithm is required, allowing for an imprecise query specification. The document presents an approach to judging relevance of retrieved information based on a novel approach to similarity assessment. Con-trary to other systems, we define relevance mea-sures (context in similarity) at query time. This is necessary if since without a context in simi-larity one cannot guarantee that similar items will also be relevant.