Mining web documents to find additional query terms using fuzzy association rules

In this paper, we present an application of association rules to query re#nement. Starting from an initial set of documents retrieved from the web, text transactions are constructed and association rules are extracted. A fuzzy extension of text transactions and association rules is employed, where the presence of the terms (items) in the documents (transactions) is determined with a value between 0 and 1. The obtained rules o4er the user additional terms to be added to the query with the purpose of guiding the search and improving the retrieval. c © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.