A new query expansion method for document retrieval based on the inference of fuzzy rules

Automatic query expansion based on user relevance feedback techniques can improve the performance of document retrieval systems. In this paper, we present a new query expansion method based on the inference of fuzzy rules and user relevance feedback techniques to deal with document retrieval. The proposed method uses membership functions and fuzzy rules to infer relevant degrees of expansion terms and puts the expansion terms with larger relevant degrees into the original user's query. Then, the system calculates the degree of similarity of each document with respect to the expanded user's query. The proposed method gets a higher average precision rate and a higher average recall rate than the existing methods for document retrieval.