CreChainDo: an iterative and interactive Web information retrieval system based on lattices

Abstract

This paper presents an iterative and interactive information retrieval (IR) system for Web search using formal concept analysis (FCA). FCA provides a natural way to organise objects according to their properties and it has been used in recent work to organise search engine results. The navigation over the lattice helps the user to explore a structured and synthetic result. Such a lattice contains concepts that are relevant and others that are not relevant regarding a given IR task. In this way, lattices are introduced in an interactive and iterative system. The user expresses his negative or positive agreement with some concept of the lattice in respect of his objective of IR. These user choices are converted into operations over the lattice. The lattice is dynamically updated for a better fit to the request.

Keywords:

• information retrieval
• concept lattices
• user feedback
• iterative search

Notes

^1. [email protected]

^2. The Coron system is freely available for non-commercial purposes at http://coron.loria.fr

^3. http://clusty.com/ [Accessed 17 September 2008].

^4. http://www.kartoo.com/ [Accessed 17 September 2008].

^5. The experimental prototype of CreChainDo is available at http://intoweb.loria.fr/CreChainDo

^6. http://www.exalead.fr/ [Accessed 17 September 2008].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yannick Toussaint

1. 1. [email protected]