Possibilistic networks for information retrieval

This paper proposes an information retrieval (IR) model based on possibilistic directed networks. The relevance of a document w.r.t a query is interpreted by two degrees: the necessity and the possibility. The necessity degree evaluates the extent to which a given document is relevant to a query, whereas the possibility degree evaluates the reasons of eliminating irrelevant documents. This new interpretation of relevance led us to revisit the term weighting scheme by explicitly distinguishing between informative and non-informative terms in a document. Experiments carried out on three standard TREC collections show the effectiveness of the model.