Preference representation in a content-oriented information retrieval system for local assembly minutes

This paper presents a content-oriented information retrieval method for the local assembly minutes written in Japanese. In this work, the “information retrieval” means the sentence extraction based on our preference specification. In contrast to the conventional keyword-based approach, our discussion puts emphasis on the enrichment of the preference representation capability. We represent preference as a pattern on the syntactic and semantic features. Three preference representation methods are described: One is the rule-based method that requires the direct coding of the preference in the form of the constraints on the syntactic and semantic features. Though this approach enables us to specify the preference in a specification, more intuitive and simpler methods are desired from the viewpoint of application. In order to achieve this, we extend the rule-based method to the example-based and the unification-based methods. Both methods are simple in that preference is specified by example sentence presentation. In the unification-based method, part of the sentences can be left unspecified so that the search engine can fill the appropriate word in the course of search. Illustrative examples are also shown using the actual minutes texts.