Developing a relevance feedback strategy for online public access catalogues

• Main Author: Goh, Anne Nai Ming.
• Other Authors: Khoo Soo Guan, Christopher
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information storage and retrieval
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/42589
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

One of the difficulties in using current Boolean-based information retrieval systems (especially the Online Public Access Catalogue) is that it is hard for a user, especially a novice, to formulate an effective Boolean query. Query reformulation can be even more difficult since users often faced difficulty incorporating the new information gained from the previous search into the next query. In this study, a relevance feedback strategy is developed for use in an Expert System Interface to the online catalogue. New relevance weighting formulas are also developed and used to weight search terms. The terms are then ordered by their weights and automatically used to construct a Boolean query. The application of relevance weighting is illustrated in the experiments conducted for ten queries. In the experiment, the relevance feedback strategy showed improvements in precision over the initial strategy. We attribute this improved performance to the ability of the relevance feedback strategies to select good terms and formulating them into a Boolean query using the appropriate Boolean operators. Although we have presented a research prototype, we believe it shows promise for use in an Expert Interface to an Online Public Access Catalogue.