Query Expansion in an Abductive Information Retrieval System

The problem of automatic query expansion is studied in the context of a logic-based information retrieval system that employs-in contrast to approaches based on deduc-tive reasoning-an abductive inference engine. Given a query, the abduction process yields a set of possible expansions to the query. An architecture for an interactive retrieval system based on abduction is proposed comprising a schema-level representation of the documents' contents and structure, an abductive retrieval engine, and a user interface which allows to control the inference process. The retrieval engine was tested on a collection of SGML-structured texts. We report on experimental results in the last section of the paper.