Towards Flexible Information Retrieval Based on CP-Nets

This paper describes a flexible information retrieval approach based on CP-Nets (Conditional Preferences Networks). The CP-Net formalism is used for both representing qualitative queries (expressing user preferences) and representing documents in order to carry out the retrieval process. Our contribution focuses on the difficult task of term weighting in the case of qualitative queries. In this context, we propose an accurate algorithm based on UCP-Net features to automatically weight Boolean queries. Furthermore, we also propose a flexible approach for query evaluation based on a flexible aggregation operator adapted to the CP-Net semantics.