Incremental Processing of Vague Queries in Interactive Retrieval Systems

The application of information retrieval techniques in interactive environments requires systems capable of efficiently processing vague queries. To reach reasonable response times, new data structures and algorithms have to be developed. In this paper we describe an approach taking advantage of the conditions of interactive usage and special access paths. To have a reference we investigate text queries and compared our algorithms to the well known "Buckley/Lewit" algorithm. We achieved significant improvements for the response times. 1 Introduction Information retrieval deals with information systems for vague queries and imprecise data. In text retrieval, imprecision is caused by the limited capabilities of a system for representing text content. Due to the implicit imprecision and vagueness of natural language, text queries are always vague. But even for fact retrieval, there is also often a need for vagueness. If we have a system containing text as well as facts, then we would lik..