Discovering Structure from Document Databases

Abstract

Querying a database for document retrieval is often a process close to querying an answering expert system. In this work, we apply the knowledge discovery techniques to build an information retrieval system by regarding the structural document database as the expertise of the knowledge discovery. In order to elicit the knowledge embedded in the document structure, a new knowledge representation, named StructuralDocuments(SD), is defined and a transformation process which can transform the documents into a set of SDs is proposed. To evaluate the performance of our idea, we developed an intelligent information retrieval system which can help users to retrieve the required personnel regulations in Taiwan. In our experiments, it can be easily seen that the retrieval results using SD are better than traditional approaches.