Induction and Inference with Fuzzy Rules for Textual Information Retrieval

Abstract

In this chapter we present a unified framework that combines fuzzy rule induction and inference with textual information retrieval using user profiles. Fuzzy rules are extracted from the fuzzy clusters dis- covered by the fuzzy C-means clustering method. These rules can be used to characterize the semantical connections between keywords in a set of textual documents, and thus the rules can be used to improve the user queries for better retrieval performance. The fuzzy rules and fuzzy clusters are also useful for modeling user profiles that describe the groups of textual documents in which the user is interested. We apply fuzzy rules to adapt user queries by fuzzy inference within a sound and complete fuzzy logic system. We show some empirical results indicat- ing that using our unified framework, the induction and application of fuzzy rules produces a more effective textual information retrieval system.