CONTROLLING RETRIEVAL THROUGH A USER-ADAPTIVE REPRESENTATION OF DOCUMENTS

Providing information retrieval systems with powerful query languages or sophisticated retrieval mechanisms is not sufficient to achieve eff ective results if the representation of documents strongly simplifies their information content. In this paper, an approach to represent doc uments as structured entities is proposed; further, by considering tha t the documents' information content can be interpreted differently ac cording to the user's needs, a mechanism is introduced in an informati on retrieval system to dynamically control the retrieval performance a ccording to the user's specifications. Finally, a comparative evaluati on of the retrieval results produced by a system using this structured document representation and the same system with a common fuzzy repre sentation is given.