Abstract
We have developed an interactive query refinement tool that helps users search a knowledge base for solutions to problems with electronic equipment. The system is targeted towards non-technical users, who are often unable to formulate precise problem descriptions on their own. Two distinct but interrelated functionalities support the refinement of a vague, non-technical initial query into a more precise problem description: a synonymy mechanism that allows the system to match non-technical words in the query with corresponding technical terms in the knowledge base, and a novel refinement mechanism that helps the user build up successively longer and more precise problem descriptions starting from the seed of the initial query. A natural language parser is used both in the application of context-sensitive synonymy rules and the construction of the refinement tree.
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Roulland, F. et al. (2007). Query Reformulation and Refinement Using NLP-Based Sentence Clustering. In: Amati, G., Carpineto, C., Romano, G. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4425. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71496-5_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71496-5_21
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