A content-search information retrieval process based on conceptual graphs

An intelligent information retrieval system is presented in this paper. In our approach, which complies with the logical view of information retrieval, queries, document contents and other knowledge are represented by expressions in a knowledge representation language based on the conceptual graphs introduced by Sowa. In order to take the intrinsic vagueness of information retrieval into account, i.e. to search documents imprecisely and incompletely represented in order to answer a vague query, different kinds of probabilistic logic are often used. The search process described in this paper uses graph transformations instead of probabilistic notions. This paper is focused on the content-based retrieval process, and the cognitive facet of information retrieval is not directly addressed. However, our approach, involving the use of a knowledge representation language for representing data and a search process based on a combinatorial implementation of van Rijsbergen's logical uncertainty principle, also allows the representation of retrieval situations. Hence, we believe that it could be implemented at the core of an operational information retrieval system. Two applications, one dealing with academic libraries and the other concerning audiovisual documents, are briefly presented.