Binômio linguística-ciência da informação: abordagem teórica para elaboração de metafiltro de recuperação da informação

Abstract

Retrieving information from the internet has been a difficult task for different reasons, one being caused by the staggering amount of information currently accessible on-line. This reality has led different areas of research into the study of filtering techniques to improve the accuracy of responses to specific requests. This paper introduces a user-friendly theoretical filtering methodology metafilter based on semantics. The objective is to make information retrieval one of the most problematic aspects of the information flow easier to accomplish. The semantic axis guiding the metafilter is based on the concept that people represent themselves and the world around them by using metaphors and that these metaphors are created from a central one called ontological metaphor. The concept of the metaphor as a semantic nucleus that could be used for information retrieval imply accepting that a collection of metaphorical representations, as well as their linguistic expressions, are part of the conceptual-semantic universe of a discourse community, keeping in mind that meaning is built in the interactive discourse exchange. The representation concept has been enlarged to include the assumption that a discourse community also represents its knowledge field with a collection of metaphors whose elements are used to identify sub-areas of that field. This identification relationship happens through the ontological concept of facets as proposed by Ranganathan: Personality, Matter, Energy, Space and Time. A case study based on a discourse community in the field of Transportation was used to illustrate the proposal. The metaphor pool used to represent this field was revealed through electronic questionnaires. The metafilter proposal was created using the relationships between the metaphoric representations and the facets with the goal of satisfying th e needs of the user in a more efficient manner. The analysis is based on the concept of interactive communication where meaning is built throughout the communication process