Boolean and Nearest Neighbour Text Searching in a Multi-Strategy Retrieval System

There are many retrieval strategies developed to retrieve documents closely related to the query. The Boolean retrieval strategy is very popular in the commercial retrieval systems whereas the nearest neighbour searching is popular in university research laboratories. These two different search strategies are analysed in a multi-strategy retrieval environment based on query characteristic variables. The experiments arc carried out in an operational environment to establish then difference in retrieval effectiveness of individual queries of different information needs and also see whether it is statistically significant.