Problem Structure and Evidential Reasoning
This work addresses performance issues in full-text document retrieval systems, though it appears incremental as it builds directly on previous studies in the same system.
The paper tackles the challenge of difficult evidential reasoning problems in the RUBRIC document retrieval system by focusing on semantic structure elements, showing that explicit consideration of these properties makes the problems more tractable.
In our previous series of studies to investigate the role of evidential reasoning in the RUBRIC system for full-text document retrieval (Tong et al., 1985; Tong and Shapiro, 1985; Tong and Appelbaum, 1987), we identified the important role that problem structure plays in the overall performance of the system. In this paper, we focus on these structural elements (which we now call "semantic structure") and show how explicit consideration of their properties reduces what previously were seen as difficult evidential reasoning problems to more tractable questions.