Fuzzy logic-based approach to develop hybrid similarity measure for efficient information retrieval

A similarity measure is used in information retrieval systems to retrieve and rank the relevant documents. In this paper, a new fuzzy-based approach to develop hybrid similarity measure is proposed and implemented. The proposed approach overcomes the limitations of extensively used similarity measures such as Cosine, Jaccard, Euclidean and Okapi-BM25 along with Genetic Algorithm-based hybrid similarity measures proposed by researchers. This approach uses fuzzy rules to infer the weights of different similarity measures. In this paper, the experiments are performed on CACM and CISI benchmark data collections. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in terms of precision, recall and average precision and average recall of retrieved relevant documents. The results are compared with different similarity measures available in literature. The results show the marked improvement in performance of information retrieval systems using the proposed fuzzy logic-based hybrid similarity measure.