Conceptual information retrieval

Abstract

A regular and demanding task in legal offices is the search for documents upon an arbitrary subject. The point lies in the fact that each new process is analysed according to similar ocurrent ones which have already - occurred the past analyses support the current one. Nevertheless, this search is time-consuming since the number of documents is generally large. Classical IR tools usually retrieve a significative amount of irrelevant documents - where the terms of the query do not express the meaning intended - and may miss relevant ones - where the meaning intended is represented by different terms. In this paper, a search engine based on Conceptual Analysis is presented. The search engine enables the retrieval of documents based on the meaning expressed by the terms of a query rather than on their lexical representation. Therefore, it attains a more effective analysis of past processes in legal offices. © Springer-Verlag 2004.