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From: jeff@cee.hw.ac.uk (Jeffrey Morgan)
Subject: phd in information retrieval and evolutionary modelling
Message-ID: <D4G4u6.503@cee.hw.ac.uk>
Sender: news@cee.hw.ac.uk (News Administrator)
Organization: Dept of Computing & Electrical Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 09:25:17 GMT
Lines: 40

The following describes my PhD project.

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       Personalising Information Retrieval Using Evoutionary Modelling

                           Jeffrey J. Morgan

When using an Information Retrieval (IR) system, the information a user wants
to retrieve changes over time. It is important to model these changes if an IR
system is to be as effective and usable as possible. Such a system must also be
able to suggest new related information that might be of interest to the user.

Modelling a user's interest profile using evolutionary techniques allows these
changes to be recorded and suggestions to be made. As well as the basic genetic
operators reproduction, crossover and mutation, the advanced operators
dominance and reordering will be used.

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a text analysis technique which improved the
rate of recall of relavent information by using the underlying semantics of the
text rather than simple keyword matching alone.

It is vital for such a system that the user is able to express as easily and as
fully as possible their feedback on the relavence of the information retrieved.

An IR system for academic journal abstracts will be built using evolutionary
modelling and LSA. It will be evaluated with users for effectiveness in the
information it retrieves and its ease of use. The system will undergo a series
of re-design and re-evaluation cycles until an effective system has been
developed.

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If anyone would like to make comments, talk about the project, or relate it
to work you are doing then please email me.

Thanks,

Jeff Morgan

