Possibilistic Pertinence Feedback and Semantic Networks for Goal's Extraction

Pertinence Feedback is a technique that enables a user to interactively express his information requirement by modifying his original query formulation with further information. This information is provided by explicitly confirming the pertinent of some indicating objects and/or goals extracted by the system. Obviously the user cannot mark objects and/or goals as pertinent until some are extracted, so the first search has to be initiated by a query and the initial query specification has to be good enough to pick out some pertinent objects and/or goals from the Semantic Network. In this paper we present a short survey of fuzzy and Semantic approaches to Knowledge Extraction. The goal of such approaches is to define flexible Knowledge Extraction Systems able to deal with the inherent vagueness and uncertainty of the Extraction process. It has long been recognised that interactivity improves the effectiveness of Knowledge Extraction systems. Novice user's queries are the most natural and interactive medium of communication and recent progress in recognition is making it possible to build systems that interact with the user. However, given the typical novice user's queries submitted to Knowledge Extraction Systems, it is easy to imagine that the effects of goal recognition errors in novice user's queries must be severely destructive on the system's effectiveness. The experimental work reported in this paper shows that the use of possibility theory in classical Knowledge Extraction techniques for novice user's query processing is more robust than the use of the probability theory. Moreover, both possibilistic and probabilistic pertinence feedback can be effectively employed to improve the effectiveness of novice user's query processing.