APPLICATION OF INFORMATION-THEORY TO QUERY NEGOTIATION - TOWARD AN OPTIMAL QUESTIONING STRATEGY

An optimal questioning strategy (OQS) based on Shannon's information theory is applied to reduce uncertainty and to measure the amount of information contained in reference queries. We adopt Klir & Folgers' (1988) distinction between vagueness and ambiguity as two forms of uncertainty. We classify certain reference queries according to these forms, and we only deal with ambiguous ones. We determine the average number of yes/no questions an information system should ask a user in order to reduce ambiguity in his or her query. This research is considered as a first effort toward constructing a framework for dealing with uncertain queries in an information system.