Applying Genetic Algorithms to Information Retrieval Using Vector Space Model

Genetic algorithms are usually used in information retrieval systems (IRs) to enhance the information retrieval process, and to increase the efficiency of the optimal information retrieval in order to meet the users' needs and help them find what they want exactly among the growing numbers of available information. The improvement of adaptive genetic algorithms helps to retrieve the information needed by the user accurately, reduces the retrieved relevant files and excludes irrelevant files. In this study, the researcher explored the problems embedded in this process, attempted to find solutions such as the way of choosing mutation probability and fitness function, and chose Cranfield English Corpus test collection on mathematics. Such collection was conducted by Cyrial Cleverdon and used at the University of Cranfield in 1960 containing 1400 documents, and 225 queries for simulation purposes. The researcher also used cosine similarity and jaccards to compute similarity between the query and documents, and used two proposed adaptive fitness function, mutation operators as well as adaptive crossover. The process aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of results according to the measures of precision and recall. Finally, the study concluded that we might have several improvements when using adaptive genetic algorithms.