Discovering Text Databases with Neural Nets

Since documents on the Web are naturally partitioned into many text databases, the efficient document retrieval process requires identifying the text databases that are most likely to provide relevant documents to the query and then searching for the identified text databases. In this paper, we propose a neural net based approach to such an efficient document retrieval. First, we present a neural net agent that learns about underlying text databases from the user's relevance feedback. For a given query, the neural net agent, which is sufficiently trained on the basis of the BPN learning mechanism, discovers the text databases associated with the relevant documents and retrieves those documents effectively. In order to scale our approach with the large number of text databases, we also propose the hierarchical organization of neural net agents which reduces the total training cost at the acceptable level. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our approach by comparing it to those of the conventional well-known approaches. Received 5 March 1999 / Revised 7 March 2000 / Accepted in revised form 2 November 2000