What You Saw Is What You Want: Using Cases to
Seed Information Retrieval *

Jody J. Daniels and Edwina L. Rissland

Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003 USA



Abstract. This paper presents a hybrid case-based reasoning (CBR)
and information retrieval (IR) system, called SPIRE, that both retrieves
documents from a full-text document corpus and from within individual 
documents, and locates passages likely to contain information about
important problem-solving features of cases. SPIRE uses two case-bases,
one containing past precedents, and one containing excerpts from past
case texts. Both are used by SPIRE to automatically generate queries,
which are then run by the INQUERY full-text retrieval engine on a large
text collection in the case of document retrieval and on individual text
documents for passage retrieval.
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