Document Retrieval by Relevance Terminological Logics

Information Retrieval (IR) is presented as the task of retrieving the documents that are relevant to a given query. In the context of a Terminological Logic (TL) based approach to IR, this amounts to embodying a notion of relevance in the logical implication relation of the chosen TL. Among the many possible readings of the term ``relevance'', the one captured by relevance logic, and in particular by first-order tautological entailment, can be viewed as a promising source of inspiration, to the end of incorporating a logic-based form of relevance in the inference mechanism of TLs. The aim of this paper is to present a Relevant Terminological Logic, while maintaining the desired ``relevance'' flavour of relevance logics, which could be considered as a base towards a suitable document description logic for IR purposes.