Controlling Retrieval through a User Adaptive Representation of Documents

Providing information retrieval systems with powerful query languages or sophisticated retrieval mechanisms is not sufficient to achieve effective results if the representation of documents strongly simplifies their information content. In this paper, an approach to represent documents as structured entities is proposed; further, by considering that the documents' information content can be interpreted differently according to the user's needs, a mechanism is introduced in an information retrieval system to dynamically control the retrieval performance according to the user's specifications. Finally, a comparative evaluation of the retrieval results produced by a system using this structured document representation and the same system with a common fuzzy representation is given