A query generalizer for providing cooperative responses in an office document system

Abstract

DOCPROS (DOCument PROcessing System) is an intelligent document processing and retrieval system [9,10,11,12,19]; it supports storing, extracting, classifying, categorizing, retrieving and browsing information from a variety of office documents. This article presents a portion of the retrieval subsystem of DOCPROS for dealing with user's empty answer queries. When processing of queries responds with an empty answer to the user, a query generalization mechanism is used to give the user a cooperative explanation for the empty answer. An efficient way is investigated for determining whether the empty answer is genuine and whether the original query reflects erroneous presuppositions, and therefore answering any failed query with a meaningful and cooperative response. It incorporates with a methodical approach to reducing the search space of generalized subqueries by analyzing the results of executing the query generalization and by efficiently applying the possible substitutions in a query to generate a small subset of relevant subqueries which are to be evaluated.