Supporting conceptual and neighborhood queries on the World Wide Web

A document retrieval system mainly consists of three components: document representation, user queries, and document evaluation. Each component may involve some uncertainties. Fuzzy set theory is a natural approach to coping with the representation of documents, queries, and the relevance of documents to a given query. The authors propose a fuzzy document retrieval model on the World Wide Web (WWW) environment to support conceptual queries. A flexible query expression is proposed to support different semantics of the queries. A concept network is adopted as the knowledge base to represent the relevance of the concepts. The concept network is explored from the WWW. Moreover, they also support neighborhood queries, which retrieve documents relevant to a document specified by a user. A system is currently being implemented to achieve these functions.