Text retrieval with more realistic concept matching and reinforcement learning

This paper reports our experimental investigation into the use of more realistic concepts as opposed to simple keywords for document retrieval, and reinforcement learning for improving document representations to help the retrieval of useful documents for relevant queries. The framework used for achieving this was based on the theory of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and Lattice Theory. Features or concepts of each document (and query), formulated according to FCA, are represented in a separate concept lattice and are weighted separately with respect to the individual documents they present. The document retrieval process is viewed as a continuous conversation between queries and documents, during which documents are allowed to learn a set of significant concepts to help their retrieval. The learning strategy used was based on relevance feedback information that makes the similarity of relevant documents stronger and non-relevant documents weaker. Test results obtained on the Cranfield collection show a significant increase in average precisions as the system learns from experience. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.