Concept coupling learning for improving concept lattice-based document retrieval

The semantic information in any document collection is critical for query understanding in information retrieval. Existing concept lattice-based retrieval systems mainly rely on the partial order relation of formal concepts to index documents. However, the methods used by these systems often ignore the explicit semantic information between the formal concepts extracted from the collection. In this paper, a concept coupling relationship analysis model is proposed to learn and aggregate the intra- and inter-concept coupling relationships. The intra-concept coupling relationship employs the common terms of formal concepts to describe the explicit semantics of formal concepts. The inter-concept coupling relationship adopts the partial order relation of formal concepts to capture the implicit dependency of formal concepts. Based on the concept coupling relationship analysis model, we propose a concept lattice-based retrieval framework. This framework represents user queries and documents in a concept space based on fuzzy formal concept analysis, utilizes a concept lattice as a semantic index to organize documents, and ranks documents with respect to the learned concept coupling relationships. Experiments are performed on the text collections acquired from the SMART information retrieval system. Compared with classic concept lattice-based retrieval methods, our proposed method achieves at least 9%, 8% and 15% improvement in terms of average MAP, IAP@11 and P@10 respectively on all the collections.