Adaptive information retrieval: using a connectionist representation to retrieve and learn about documents

Abstract

AIR represents a connectionist approach to the task of information retrieval. The system uses relevance feedback from its users to change its representation of authors, index terms and documents so that, over time, AIR improves at its task. The result is a representation of the consensual meaning of keywords and documents shared by some group of users. The central focus goal of this paper is to use our experience with AIR to highlight those characteristics of connectionist representations that make them particularly appropriate for IR applications. We argue that this associative representation is a natural generalization of traditional IR techniques, and that connectionist learning techniques are effective in this setting.