Fuzzy logic and multiobjective evolutionary algorithms as soft computing tools for persistent query learning in text retrieval environments

Persistent queries are a specific kind of queries used in information retrieval systems to represent a user\´s long-term standing information need. These queries can present many different structures, being the "bag of words" that most commonly used. They can be sometimes formulated by the user, although this task is usually difficult for him and the persistent query is then automatically derived from a set of sample documents he provides. In this work we aim at getting persistent queries with a more representative structure for text retrieval issues. To do so, we make use of soft computing tools: fuzzy logic is considered for representation and inference purposes by dealing with the extended Boolean query structure, and multiobjective evolutionary algorithms are applied to build the persistent fuzzy query. Experimental results show how both an expressive fuzzy logic-based query structure and a proper learning process to derive it are needed in order to get a good retrieval efficacy, when comparing our process to single-objective evolutionary methods to derive both classic Boolean and extended Boolean queries.