| Information Retrieval (IR) typically retrieves entire documents in response to a user's information need. However, many times a user would prefer to examine smaller portions of a document. One example of this is when building a frame-based representation of a text. The user would like to read all and only those portions of the text that are about predefined important features.; This research addresses the problem of automatically locating text about these features, where the important features are those defined for use by a case-based reasoning (CBR) system in the form of features and values or slots and fillers.; To locate important text pieces we gathered a small set of "excerpts", textual segments, when creating the original case-base representations. Each segment contains the local context for a particular feature within a document. We used these excerpts to generate queries that retrieve relevant passages. By locating passages for display to the user, we winnow a text down to sets of several sentences, greatly reducing the time and effort expended searching through each text for important features. |
