Fuzzy multilinkage thesaurus builder in multimedia information systems

Abstract

The thesaurus is widely used in information indexing and retrieval for vocabulary control and concept search. Conceptual relationships are usually reciprocal and many-to-many, and can hardly be described precisely. To comply with the imprecise nature of the thesaurus, we have proposed and developed a fuzzy multilinkage thesaurus builder. The builder maintains a fuzzy membership degree for each relationship. The relationships are extensible and have an inheritance capability. The applications of the fuzzy multilinkage thesaurus builder to expand the query terms for multimedia information retrieval are presented.