An ordinal information retrieval model

In this paper an ordinal Information Retrieval model is proposed, which is formalised within fuzzy set theory and is based on the notion of linguistic granules of information. Linguistic expressions are defined to represent and manage the importance of both the index terms as descriptors of the information items and the query terms (content selectors) as descriptors of users' needs. The advantage of this approach with respect to the (numeric) fuzzy IR models is that the query evaluation mechanism and the definition of the importance semantics are simplified.