Cooperative answering through controlled query relaxation

As knowledge storage systems grow in size and complexity, it becomes unreasonable to expect that users always know enough about the data and how the data are organized to construct accurate and useful queries. Even when a system has syntactic utilities for building queries, users continue to compose queries that contain misconceptions, are too general, or are bound to fail. Cooperative-answering strategies seek to detect such situations and collaborate automatically with users to find the information that the users are seeking. Relaxation can automatically identify new queries related to an original query. The author introduces methods to control and restrict relaxation, thus making it more efficient.