Newsgroups: comp.ai.genetic
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From: jeff@cee.hw.ac.uk (Jeffrey Morgan)
Subject: asexual reproduction operator
Message-ID: <DM783q.C8x@cee.hw.ac.uk>
Sender: news@cee.hw.ac.uk (News Administrator)
Organization: Dept of Computing & Electrical Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 12:02:14 GMT
Lines: 39

Dear All,

Has anyone come across a genetic operator that reproduces asexually?

I have a population of individuals used to produce queries to an
information retrieval system. Each individual is a query and each
gene is an English word.

I thought a good way to implement query expansion would be to produce
a number of children from 1 parent; each child being a synonym variant
of the parent.

E.g. from the query:-

		CHINESE COOKERY

4 synonym variants could be:-

		ASIATIC COOKERY
		CHINESE COOKING
		SINITIC CUISINE
		SINITIC LANGUAGE CULINARY ART

The purpose being to search the immediate area of the search space point
of the parent query.

I would like to know:-

1. If anyone has used a similar sort of operator (using a real or coded
   representation) and

2. If anyone has any objections to this sort of operator in terms of the
   established GA theory.

-- 
Jeffrey J. Morgan      		   Dept. of Computing & Electrical Engineering
jeff@cee.hw.ac.uk		   Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh
http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk:80/~jeff/  EH14 4AS, UK.
Tel: +44 131 449 5111 ext 4188	   Fax: +44 131 451 3327
