An assertion-based information acquisition system exploiting hierarchical structures of documents

This paper presents a new kind of document-information acquisition system, which we call an information probe system. This system is intended to enable the user-centric acquisition of information in which authors and users may not have a common interpretation. The notion of the ldquoskeletonrdquo is devised to abstract the relations between terms that appear in the pairs of adjacent layers of hierarchical documents. The skeleton reflects the assertions made by authors, and its formal description is presented by applying the notation of conceptual graphs. This model has produced a scheme for the assertion-based acquisition of information. The assertions of authors and of users are represented as respective sets of terms and their relations; document information is then selectively acquired by comparing the assertions. Probing is intended to cater to the original interpretations of individual users, and uses assertions as clues in searching for document information.