A Logical Relational Approach for Information Retrieval Indexing

In a relational indexing approach (see e.g. Farradane’s work), information is carried by a fixed set of relationship types over an underlying set of terms. The idea is that the essence of the meaning of information is encapsulated in the relationships between terms. The importance of relationships is now widely recognized within many fields such as relational databases and knowledge representation formalisms. These fields have substantially improved our understanding of relationships and the problems involved in trying to formalize them. However, although those relationships can be correctly represented by almost all the well-known formalisms in such fields, they are not exploited as much as the objects by concrete operations. In information retrieval, previous attempts at managing relationships have mainly addressed structural aspects, and exclude the manipulation of index expressions by relational operations. This paper suggests a prime use of the relation properties through a logical framework, in a way that it can improve the effectiveness of the matching operation.