The use of adaptive mechanisms for selection of search strategies in document retrival systems

A document retrieval system can incorporate many types of flexibility. One example of this is the ability to choose a search strategy that is appropriate for a particular user and query. This paper investigates the use of adaptive mechanisms to control the selection of search strategies. The experimental results indicate that, although an adaptive mechanism is capable of learning the appropriate response in simple situations, there are serious problems with using them to make complex decisions in a document retrieval system.