27,859 research outputs found
The Epistemological Foundations of Knowledge Representations
This paper looks at the epistemological foundations of knowledge
representations embodied in retrieval languages. It considers questions
such as the validity of knowledge representations and their effectiveness
for the purposes of retrieval and automation. The knowledge
representations it considers are derived from three theories of meaning that
have dominated twentieth-century philosophy.published or submitted for publicatio
Applied Epistemology and Understanding in Information Studies
Introduction. Applied epistemology allows information studies to benefit from developments in philosophy. In information studies, epistemic concepts are rarely considered in detail. This paper offers a review of several epistemic concepts, focusing on understanding, as a call for further work in applied epistemology in information studies.
Method. A hermeneutic literature review was conducted on epistemic concepts in information studies and philosophy. Relevant research was retrieved and reviewed iteratively as the research area was refined.
Analysis. A conceptual analysis was conducted to determine the nature and relationships of the concepts surveyed, with an eye toward synthesizing conceptualizations of understanding and opening future research directions.
Results. The epistemic aim of understanding is emerging as a key research frontier for information studies. Two modes of understanding (hermeneutic and epistemological) were brought into a common framework.
Conclusions. Research on understanding in information studies will further naturalistic information research and provide coherence to several strands of philosophic thought
Deduction over Mixed-Level Logic Representations for Text Passage Retrieval
A system is described that uses a mixed-level representation of (part of)
meaning of natural language documents (based on standard Horn Clause Logic) and
a variable-depth search strategy that distinguishes between the different
levels of abstraction in the knowledge representation to locate specific
passages in the documents. Mixed-level representations as well as
variable-depth search strategies are applicable in fields outside that of NLP.Comment: 8 pages, Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Tools
with Artificial Intelligence (TAI'96), Los Alamitos C
Non-Compositional Term Dependence for Information Retrieval
Modelling term dependence in IR aims to identify co-occurring terms that are
too heavily dependent on each other to be treated as a bag of words, and to
adapt the indexing and ranking accordingly. Dependent terms are predominantly
identified using lexical frequency statistics, assuming that (a) if terms
co-occur often enough in some corpus, they are semantically dependent; (b) the
more often they co-occur, the more semantically dependent they are. This
assumption is not always correct: the frequency of co-occurring terms can be
separate from the strength of their semantic dependence. E.g. "red tape" might
be overall less frequent than "tape measure" in some corpus, but this does not
mean that "red"+"tape" are less dependent than "tape"+"measure". This is
especially the case for non-compositional phrases, i.e. phrases whose meaning
cannot be composed from the individual meanings of their terms (such as the
phrase "red tape" meaning bureaucracy). Motivated by this lack of distinction
between the frequency and strength of term dependence in IR, we present a
principled approach for handling term dependence in queries, using both lexical
frequency and semantic evidence. We focus on non-compositional phrases,
extending a recent unsupervised model for their detection [21] to IR. Our
approach, integrated into ranking using Markov Random Fields [31], yields
effectiveness gains over competitive TREC baselines, showing that there is
still room for improvement in the very well-studied area of term dependence in
IR
Looking at Vector Space and Language Models for IR using Density Matrices
In this work, we conduct a joint analysis of both Vector Space and Language
Models for IR using the mathematical framework of Quantum Theory. We shed light
on how both models allocate the space of density matrices. A density matrix is
shown to be a general representational tool capable of leveraging capabilities
of both VSM and LM representations thus paving the way for a new generation of
retrieval models. We analyze the possible implications suggested by our
findings.Comment: In Proceedings of Quantum Interaction 201
Sense resolution properties of logical imaging
The evaluation of an implication by Imaging is a logical technique developed
in the framework of modal logic. Its interpretation in the context of a “possible
worlds” semantics is very appealing for IR. In 1994, Crestani and Van Rijsbergen
proposed an interpretation of Imaging in the context of IR based on the assumption
that “a term is a possibleworld”. This approach enables the exploitation of term–
term relationshipswhich are estimated using an information theoretic measure.
Recent analysis of the probability kinematics of Logical Imaging in IR have
suggested that this technique has some interesting sense resolution properties. In
this paper we will present this new line of research and we will relate it to more
classical research into word senses
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