Exploiting the potential of concept lattices for Information Retrieval with CREDO

The recent advances in Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) together with the major changes faced by modern Information Retrieval (IR) provide new unprecedented challenges and opportunities for FCA-based IR applications. The main advantage of FCA for IR is the possibility of creating a conceptual representation of a given document collection in the form of a document lattice, which may be used both to improve the retrieval of specific items and to drive the mining of the collection's contents. In this paper, we will examine the best features of FCA for solving IR tasks that could not be easily addressed by conventional systems, as well as the most critical aspects for building FCA-based IR applications. These observations have led to the development of CREDO, a system that allows the user to query Web documents and see retrieval results organized in a browsable concept lattice. This is the second major focus of the paper. We will show that CREDO is especially useful for quickly locating the documents corresponding to the meaning of interest among those retrieved in response to an ambiguous query, or for mining the contents of the documents that reference a given entity. An on-line version of the system is available for testing at http://credo.fub.it.