Similarity or inference for assessing relevance in information retrieval

The primary objective of an information retrieval system is to provide the user with relevant documents given the user´s query. Numerous approaches to determining a document´s relevance have been proposed based on the underlying retrieval model. In the paper, similarity-based and inference-based IR models are examined. A fuzzy information retrieval model is presented such that assessing document relevancy is based on the user´s interpretation of the query term weights. The close relationship between the similarity-based and inference-based IR models is investigated in the context of the fuzzy information retrieval model