A Knowledge-Based Approach to the Design of Document-Based Retrieval Systems

Chen, Hsinchun and Dhar, Vasant (1990) A Knowledge-Based Approach to the Design of Document-Based Retrieval Systems. In Proceedings Conference on Office Information Systems, pages pp. 281-290, Boston, MA.

Abstract

This article presents a knowledge-based approach to the design of document-based retrieval systems. We conducted two empirical studies investigating the users' behavior using an online catalog. The studies revcaled a range of knowledge elements which are necessary for performing a successful search. We proposed a semantic network based representation to capture these knowledge elements. The findings we derived from our empirical studies were used to construct a knowledge-based retrieval system. We performed a laboratory experiment to calculate the search performance of our system. The experiment showed that our system out-performed a conventional retrieval system in recall and user satisfaction. The implications of our study to the design of document-based retrieval systems are also discussed in this article.