Boolean similarity measures for resource discovery.pdf

Boolean Similarity Measures for Resource DiscoveryTechnical Report USC-CS-94-579Shih-Hao Li and Peter B. DanzigComputer Science DepartmentUniversity of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles, California 90089-0781fshli, danzigg@cs.usc.eduAbstractWe develop a new method to rank the degree of similarity between Boolean expressions, contrastit with other known methods, and describe its implementation. Our method reduces time and spacecomplexity from exponential to polynomial in the number of Boolean terms.Index Terms - Boolean query, information retrieval, ranking, resource discovery, similarity measure.1 IntroductionMost library information systems let users make Boolean queries against their database. Internet resourcediscovery systems, such as WAIS [1] and our Indie [2], also support Boolean queries. Frequently, users ndit convenient if the retrieval system returns the answers to their queries in a ranked order. This paperdevelops an ecient algorithm to rank the similarity between a users Boolean query and a set of objects,each described by a Boolean expression. Our method produces similarity rankings between zero and one. Ifthe query and the object with which it is compared contain some identical terms, the similarity is non-zero.If they are identical, the similarity is close or equal to one. If they contain no common terms whatsoever,the similarity is zero.Directory of services are retrieval systems that greatly benet from ranking. The objects they containare descriptions of other retrieval systems. Directory of services enable users to nd retrieval systems thatthey previously did not know existed. As shown in Figure 1, a user sends his query to the directory ofservices which determines and ranks the retrieval systems relevant to the users request. It does this byestimating the \similarity between the users query and the description of each retrieval system. The useremploys the rankings when selecting the retrieval systems to query directly. Indie, WAIS, and GLOSS [3]