A New Hierarchical Conceptual Graph Formalism Adapted for Chinese Document Retrieval

In this paper, we present a hierarchical conceptual graph formalism to describe the meaning of document content in a specified domain. This formalism can be considered as an extension of the Sowa formalism of conceptual graphs, in which concept vertices are extended to be a recursive structure. Based on this hierarchical framework, we index the documents and queries into such graphs, and propose a new comparison operator between graphs taking the needs of retrieval into account. This operator is the core of the searching process of our document management system, called HCG-DMS, which manages Chinese documents for virtual database. This Chinese collection is searched by their conceptual graphs built from the titles now. The first retrieval evaluation of our method gives better results than traditional Boolean-model based documentary system.