Information Retrieval in Hypertext Systems: an Approach Using Bayesian Networks

The emphasis in most hypertext systems is on the navigational methods, rather than on the global document retrieval mechanisms. When a search mechanism is provided, it is often restricted to simple string matching or to the Boolean model. As an alternate method, we propose a retrieval mechanism using Bayesian inference networks. The main contribution of our approach is the automatic construction of this network using the expected mutual information measure to build the inference tree, and using Jaccard’s formula to define fixed conditional probability relationships.