U.S.-Germany Cooperative Research on the Integration of Textand Database Systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award will support collaborative research in computer science between Dr. W. Bruce Croft, University of Massachusetts, and Professor Erich Neuhold, Integrated Publishing and Information Systems Institute, German National Research Center for Computer Science, Darmstadt, Germany. The objective of the project is to improve text retrieval models. There is an increasing need for information systems that can provide access to complex, multimedia data. Conventional database systems provide many useful data management functions, but have a limited capacity for handling unstructured data, such as text. Dr. Croft's current research focuses on text- based information retrieval that uses relevance feedback from the searcher to modify intelligently subsequent queries and improve overall retrieval effectiveness. The proposed cooperative work will explore ways to incorporate relevance feedback and probabilistic retrieval models that are used in text-based information retrieval with relational database models used in field-oriented information retrieval. The approach is to represent documents and queries as separate directed graphs; the document will be static and the query graphs will be matched to the document graphs and reconstructed dynamically, based on feedback from the searcher. The research project will benefit from the complementary expertise of the two investigators. Dr. Croft will work on the retrieval model and study the implications of this model for hypertext retrieval and integrated query languages. Professor Neuhold will concentrate on the implications for data models, the actual integration with a database system, and the design of user interfaces for the integrated system. The results of this research are expected to lead to a better understanding of the issues of integration, both from a theoretical perspective and from practical experience gained through building a prototype.