● Rules (i)-(vii) are in contrast with the fuzzy set literature.

e. It should have been defined a fuzzy set for

each label. But since there is no ambiguity in the assignment of 0 or 1, the use of crisp set makes
more sense.
● Linguistic quantifiers are more likely to be modeled by fuzzy sets because of the meaning ambiguity.
The presented method just ordered the qualifiers and put them in a linear scale. This choice was
made to reduce the computational effort of manipulating fuzzy sets and because the similarity gives
more importance to term location instead of qualifiers.
● The method for dealing with linguistic quantifier has not been applied to the query part of the system
because authors of the paper believe that it is pointless. Instead, a fuzzy based model, which
accounts for semantic ambiguity and flexibility, is more appropriate to increase the precision of the
search.
The proposed Fuzzy IR system can be summarized by the following picture

The portion on the left is a process that is done just for the first time. Documents are split in tokens,
stopwords are removed, stemming is performed, and quantifiers are identified. Then, the inverted index is
built and for each document a fuzzy set µ𝑑 over index terms is computed. Each index term in the document
𝑗

𝑑𝑗 will have nonzero membership function for the fuzzy set µ𝑑 .

𝑗

The portion on the right plus the one in the bottom is carried out every time the user prompts a query. Each
“predicate” of the query is treated like a document, then merged with the other parts using fuzzy operators.
So, there is a fuzzy set representing the query, with weights associated to query terms. At this point, the
similarity between the documents fuzzy sets and the query fuzzy set is computed. The result of the query is
the ranked list of documents, eventually limited by a maximum quantity number, or by a similarity threshold
value.
The authors of the paper tried this IR system on a university database composed by 1500 papers. Precision
and recall were used to measure the system performance. They found out better precision and recall
compared to the Boolean model, with the same set of similar queries. However, this increase of performance
comes with an increasing of computation time.

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