GANNET: A machine learning approach to document retrieval

Abstract

Information science researchers have recently turned to new artificial intelligence-based inductive learning techniques including neural networks, symbolic learning and genetic algorithms. An overview of the new techniques and their usage in information science research is provided. The algorithms adopted for a hybrid genetic algorithms and neural nets based system, called GANNET, are presented. GANNET performed concept (keyword) optimization for user-selected documents during information retrieval using the genetic algorithms. It then used the optimized concepts to perform concept exploration in a large network of related concepts through the Hopfield net parallel relaxation procedure. Based on a test collection of about 3,000 articles from DIALOG and an automatically created thesaurus, and using Jaccard's score as a performance measure, the experiment showed that GANNET improved the Jaccard's scores by about 50% and helped identify the underlying concepts that best describe the user-selected documents.