Document-Based Retrieval Systems

This article presents a knowledge-based approach to the design of document-based retrieval systems. We conducted two empirical studies investigating the users' behavior using an online catalog. The studies revcaled a range of knowledge elements which are necessary for performing a successful search. We proposed a semantic nctwork based representation to capture these knowledge elements. The findings we derived from our empirical studies were used to construct a knowledge-based retrieval system. We performed a laboratory experiment LO cvaluate the search performance of our system. The experiment showed that our system out-performed a conventional retrieval system in recall and user satisfaction. The implications of our study to the design of document-based retrieval systems are also discussed in this article.