An incrementally extensible document retrieval system based on linguistic and logical principles

摘要

Most natural language based document retrieval systems use the syntax structures of constituent phrases of documents as index terms. Many of these systems also attempt to reduce the syntactic variability of natural language by some normalisation procedure applied to these syntax structures. However, the retrieval performance of such systems remains fairly disappointing. Some systems therefore use a meaning representation language to index and retrieve documents. In this paper, a system is presented that uses Horn Clause Logic as meaning representation language, employs advanced techniques from natural Language Processing to achieve incremental extensibility, and uses methods from Logic Programming to achieve robustness in the face of insufficient data.