Conceptual information retrieval

Abstract

Abstract : If we want to build intelligent information retrieval systems, we will have to give them the capabilities of understanding Natural language, automatically organizing and reorganizing their memories, and using intelligent heuristics for searching their memories. These systems will have to analyze and understand both new text and Natural Language queries. In answering questions, they will have to direct memory search to reasonable places. This requires good organization of both the conceptual content of text and knowledge necessary for understanding those texts and accessing memory. The CYRUS and FRUMP systems (Kolodner (1978), Schank and Kolodner (1979), Dejong (1979)) comprise an information retrieval system called CyFr. Together, they have the analysis and retrieval capabilities mentioned above. FRUMP analysis news stories from the UPI wire for their conceptual content, and produces summaries of those stories. It sends summaries of stories about important people to CYRUS automatically adds those stories to its memory, and can then retrieve that information to answer question posed to it in natural language. This paper describes the problems involved in building such an intelligent system. It proposes solutions to some of those problems bases on recent research in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language processing, and describes the CyFr system, which implements those solutions. The solutions we propose and implement are based on a model of human understanding and memory retrieval. (Author)