Towards a statistical grammar of usage for document retrieval in digital libraries

Due to the huge amount of available information via Internet, the identification of reliable and interesting items becomes more and more difficult and time consuming. The way we propose to cope with this difficulty consists in integrating a grammar of usage. We decide to ignore the nature, the content and the structure of resources. This paper is a position paper describing our intended work in the framework of multimedia information retrieval by browsing techniques within digital libraries. It relies on a usage-based indexing of resources. We describe a new approach taking advantage of the similarity between statistical modeling of language and document retrieval systems. We build syntax of usages and design a statistical grammar of usage (SGU) that allows resources classification to design personalized filtering.