Modeling the Retrieval Process of an Information Retrieval System Using an Ordinal Fuzzy Linguistic Approach

A linguistic model of an Information Retrieval System (IRS) dened using an ordinal fuzzy linguistic approach is proposed. The ordinal fuzzy linguistic approach is presented and the use of it for modeling the imprecision and subjectivity that appears in the user-IRS interaction is studied. The user queries and IRS responses are modeled linguistically using the concept of fuzzy linguistic variable. The system accepts Boolean queries whose terms are weighted by means of ordinal linguistic values according to three semantics at a time: threshold semantic, quantitative semantic and importance semantic. The threshold and importance semantics are used by the users in order to express qualitative restrictions on the desired documents, while the quantitative semantic is introduced in order to allow users to express quantitative restrictions on the desired documents. A query evaluation mechanism based on the bottom-up evaluation processes is presented. This mechanism integrates coherently the a..