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Evaluation of an expert system for searching in full text

This paper presents a prototype expert system which provides online search assistance. The expert system automatically reformulates queries, using an online thesaurus as the source of domain knowledge, and a knowledge base of domain-independent search tactics. The expert system works with a full-text database which requires no syntactic or semantic pre-processing. In addition, the expert system ranks the retrieved passages in decreasing order of probable relevance.
Users' search performance using the expert system was compared with their search performance on their own, and their search performance using the online thesaurus. The following conclusions were reached: 1) The expert system significantly reduced the number of queries necessary to find relevant passages compared with the user searching alone or with the thesaurus. 2) The expert system produced marginally significant improvements in precision compared with the user searching on their own. There was no significant difference in the recall achieved by the three system configurations. 3) Overall, the expert system ranked relevant passages above irrelevant passages.