Matching Word-Order Variations and Sorting Results for the iEPG Data Search

This paper describes using a finite-state automaton (FSA) to retrieve Japanese TV guide text. The proposed FSA application can be considered novel due to lack of research on the subject. The automaton has been implemented for matching and extracting all possible combinations of search query words in all possible word orders that may be present in the TV guide text. This implementation also sorts the extraction results by analyzing word semantic features (such as “being an object” or “being a property of an object”). The present paper also proposes a search system using the above implementation and compares it with a baseline system that matches query words (of multi-word queries) in exactly the same and exactly the opposite word orders only. Both systems use morphological parsing and apply a stop list to the query. A multi-parameter evaluation has shown advantages of the proposed system over the baseline one.