An Approach to Incorporating CBR Concepts in IR Systems

Information retrieval (IR) is concerned with techniques that can provide effective access to large databases of objects that contain primarily text. It is generally assumed that there is a wide variety of users and a large number of potential queries. Although these characteristics are different than those of a typical case-based reasoning (CBR) application, there are opportunities for integration of the two approaches. To demonstrate that this is possible, we first describe IR techniques in more detail. After a brief overview of CBR, we then outline an approach to integration that takes advantage of the strengths of both approaches. We also give a simple example of how an integrated CBR/IR system could be used to address a real information need.